LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf._^? ^"^ 
. UN- 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THOUGHTS 



ON 



¥HE fioLY GOSPELS : 



HOW THEY CAME TO BE IN MANNER AND 
FORM AS THEY ARE. 



FRANCIS WrUPHAM, LL.D., 
*\ 

Author of " The Church and Science," " The Wise Men, Who They 
Were," and " The Star of our Lord." 






NEW YORK: 
PHILLIPS & HUNT 

CINCINNATI: 
WALDEN & STOWE. 

I88I. 




^ 



3 s * 



S&S 



Copyright, 1881, by 

PHILLIPS & HUNT, 

New York. 









CONTENTS. 



13-20 



Introduction 

PAET FIEST. 

CHAPTER I. 

OPENING THE WAY. 

Christ Jesus calls to Himself His Witnesses before 
any sermon, before any miracle— The first official act of 
His chosen Disciples similar in character— On that oc- 
casion St. Peter declares the Resurrection to be the 
Great Sign that Jesus was the Son of God— The Signifi- 
cance of the Resurrection— The Disciples find the main 
evidence of it in the Life of their Lord before His 
Crucifixion— Some of the bearings of this upon the 
Construction of the Gospels ; upon the brevity of the 
direct evidence of the Resurrection given by St. Mat- 
thew ; also upon his silence concerning the Ascension- 
Consideration of the fact that the faith of the Disciples 
in their Lord was, for the moment, paralyzed by His 
Death 21-38 

CHAPTER II. 

intent to have a written gospel. 
Absurdity of the assertion that the chosen Witnesses 
never thought of writing out the Gospel— Review of 
what has been said to give a color of pretense to this 



4 CONTENTS. 

notion — The Traditions of the Elders — Verbal Coinci- 
dences in the Three Earlier Gospels — Error that there 
was no literary instinct then at work among the Jews — 
Philo of Alexandria, Justus of Tiberias, and Josephus 
— His character, and the Intent of his History of the 
Jews — St. Matthew wrote to complete the ancient 
Scripture 39-5 1 

CHAPTER III. 

THE RECEIVED DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 

The infidel assumption that the Witnesses never 
thought of writing out the Gospel made to prepare the 
way for the further ssumption that the Gospels are 
later than their Received Date — Review of the evidence 
of their Date — The Silence after St. Luke wrote — Wit- 
ness to the Gospels in the Second Century — Reverence 
for the Writings of the Apostles — Ready means of inter- 
communication among the Christian Congregations 
throughout the Roman world — The usage of the ever- 
existing Church the proper and sufficient evidence 
of the Genuineness and Authenticity of Her own 
Records 52-74 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. 

Bearing of the received Date and Authorship of the 
Gospels upon questions raised by literary Criticism — 
The purpose for which the Gospels were written — A 
consequence of this that infidels are unfitted to criticise 
them — Nothing trustworthy in their writings — Bearing 
of the purpose of the Evangelists upon their method — 
Illustration of their method — Bearing of the purpose of 



CONTENTS. 5 

the Evangelists upon the mythical, legendary, and rag- 
ged theories, as to the Origin and Construction of the 
Gospels 75-87 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN GOSPEL. 

Of the Oral Gospel — Difficulties in the way of fram- 
ing it — The Apostles decide to transfer the Gospel from 
the Aramean tongue into the Greek ; and that its cita- 
tions of Scripture shall be made from the Septuagint — 
Several forms of the Oral Gospel, and one more common 
Form — Use made of the Oral Gospel by the Three 
Earlier Evangelists — Answer to the question, Where is 
the witness of all the Apostles ? 88-106 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE WRITING OUT OF THE GOSPEL. 

Reasons why each of the Apostles did not write out 
the Gospel — They Select Matthew and John for their 
Evangelists — Proof of this in the fact that those Two, 
and only those Two, of the Twelve Chosen Witnesses 
wrote out the Gospel — Reasons for their Choice of St. 
John ; for their Choice of St. Matthew 107-112 

CHAPTER VII. 

LIMITATIONS OF THE GOSPELS. 

Concert between the elect Evangelists — Of the time 
that St. John took to meditate upon his Gospel — The 
Division of the field of the Ministry between St. Mat- 
thew and St John — Its Geographical and other reasons. 



6 CONTENTS. 

— Peculiar Feeling of the Jews, in the time of the Dis- 
ciples, that Judea only was the Holy Land — Evidence 
of this in the story of Petronius — Why the Oral Gospel 
and the second and third of the Written Gospels were, 
like St. Matthew's, so much restricted to the land of 
Galilee — The inspired Evangelists reveal Christ Jesus 
as the Saviour — Bearing of this upon the Construction 
of their Gospels 113-133 

CHAPTER VIII. 

INSPIRATION OF THE GOSPELS. 

Fullness of the Promises of Divine Aid to the Disci- 
ples in their office of Witnessing to the Lord — They 
reach to Words as well as to Thoughts — Concerning the 
Nature and the Limits of Human Testimony — Did the 
Holy Spirit secure the absolute accuracy of the Chosen 
Witnesses in every detail of every thing their Witness 
touched upon ? — St. Jerome's and St. Augustine's opin- 
ion that He did — The accuracy of each Statement in 
the Gospels can be verified — Bearing of this fact upon 
the Inspiration of the whole Bible 134-146 



PAET SECOND. 

CHAPTER I. 

STYLE OF THE EVANGELISTS. 

Underestimate of the literary and historic merits of 
the Evangelists — Of their Style — Its fitness to their 
subject — Inquiry into the charge that they were heed- 
less in marking Times and Seasons — Their Silence as 



CONTENTS. 7 

to the Day of our Lord's Birth — The Full Beginning 
of His Ministry in Galilee, and other Dates in the 
Gospels 147-158 

CHAPTER II. 

TIME OF ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 

Introduction to an Essay concerning some remarkable 
peculiarities of the Earliest of the Gospels 159-163 

The believers in Christ Jesus as the Messiah looked 
upon, for a time, as a Jewish sect from which nothing 
was to be feared — The state of Feeling in Jerusalem 
after the Crucifixion — Change seen in the arrest of St. 
Stephen — Character and intent of the Persecution that 
followed — Its effect upon one then writing of the origin 
of the imperiled Sect — General and special Evidence 
in St. Matthew's Gospel that it was written as early as 
the Seventh year after the Crucifixion — Of the Trans- 
ferring of his Gospel by the Apostle himself, at a later 
Date, from the Aramean tongue into the Greek. 164-195 

CHAPTER III. 

THE GENEALOGY IN ST. MATTHEW. 

Bearings of the Discovery, verified in the preceding 
chapter, upon St. Matthew's giving the Genealogy of 
St. Joseph to prove the Messianic lineage of Jesus — 
Loss of much knowledge of ancient Jewish usages, and 
the gradual recovery of some of that knowledge — Feat- 
ures of the Genealogy in the Earliest Gospel — How it 
proves the ancestry of Jesus — The reason why St. Mat- 
thew did not give the Genealogy of the Mother of our 
Lord — Evidence of this in some verses in the Gospel of 
St. Luke 196-208 



8 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE GOSPEL OF THE INFANCY. 

Alleged variances between the Gospels of St. Matthew 
and St. Luke as to the Infancy — They grow out of St. 
Matthew's concern for the safety of the Blessed Virgin 
— Importance of the Time-Order of the Gospels — St. 
Luke's Silence concerning the Coming of the Magi and 
the Flight into Egypt — St. Matthew's caution reaches 
to the kindred of the Holy Virgin — Evidence of this in 
his silence concerning the two miracles wrought in Cana 
of Galilee — Similar caution in the Second and Third 
Gospels 209-226 



PAET THIED. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN GOSPEL. 

Of the Thirty-three recorded Miracles, all the Evan- 
gelists record the Sacramental Miracle — Twelve mira- 
cles belong to the Oral Gospel, and probably Five 
others — Five are given only in the Gospel of St. John — 
The recital by the Three earlier Evangelists of the 
other Ten recorded miracles, shown to be related to 
their Characters, or to the Plans of their Gospels, or to 
something peculiar to those miracles — The Healing of 
Malchus, the Paying of the Temple-Tax, and other 
Miracles — The relation of the Discourses and Parables 
in the Earlier Gospels to the Oral Gospel — Absence of 
Parables from the Last Gospel 227-239 



CONTENTS. 9 

CHAPTER II. 

ST. JOHN AND THE EARLIER GOSPELS. 

Reasons for Treating of the Earlier Chapters of the 
] ast Gospel — The Different Portraits of John the Bap- 
t st — consistency of his Character and History — Why 
Lis personal Testimony to the Messiah is given only in 
the Final Gospel — Of the bringing in of his Witness into 
the Prelude to the Gospel of St. John 240-253 

CHAPTER III. 

THE EARLIER CHAPTERS OF ST. JOHN. 

Of the Continuing of the Proclamation of the Baptist 
— Of the Earlier Ministry of the Lord in Judea as a test 
of its Fitness to be the Field of the Gospel, and as Pre- 
paratory to the Full Beginning of His Ministry — The 
Miracle at the Wedding-Feast at Cana in Galilee — The 
Cleansing of the Temple — The Coming of Nicodemus 
by Night — The Silence of John concerning the Miracles 
then wrought in Jerusalem — His reference to the Im- 
prisonment of the Baptist — The Warning sent to Jesus, 
and His Flight from Judea — The Revelation of the 
Messiahship to the Woman of Samaria 254-274 

CHAPTER IV. 

ST. JOHN AND THE EARLIER GOSPELS. 

Nathanael's Confession, and the Earlier Call of cer- 
tain of the Disciples — The Confession of the Disciples 
recorded by St. John not to be confounded with the 
later Confession at Caesarea-Philippi — Of the Prudence 



10 CONTENTS. 

of our Lord as made known in the Earlier Chapters of 
the Final Gospel — Why only one Going up to Jerusalem 
is spoken of in the Earlier Gospels 275-286 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FIRST AND THE SECOND GOSPELS. 

Of the Theory that the Earliest Gospel was for the 
Jews, the Second for the Romans, and the Third for the 
Greeks — Of St. Matthew's historic Gifts — Differences 
between his Gospel and St. Mark's and St. Luke's — 
The Descriptions of the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 
in the first and second Gospels, compared — Of St. Mat- 
thew and St. Peter as narrators — The originating motive 
of the Second Gospel — Other motives — Its evidence 
of the Incarnation — Testimony of the Fathers to St. 
Mark's having written out the Gospel of St. Peter — 
Of the Divine Foreshaping of the Facts that were to 
become a part of the Holy Gospel 287-319 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE. 

Of St. Luke's Repetition of some Facts for the third 
time — New material in his Gospel — The testimony of 
the Fathers to St. Luke's having written out the Gospel 
of St. Paul — The Common Interpretation of St. Luke's 
Preface untenable — Interpreted in harmony with its his- 
toric relations — Of what St. Paul wrote to the Galatians 
concerning his Gospel — The Epistle to the Hebrews — 
The Acts of the Apostles — St. Luke writes under the 
eye and in the Defense of the Apostle to the Gentiles — 



CONTENTS. I I 

yet St. Luke is more than the Champion of St. Paul and 
more than the Historian of the Church — The Relation 
of the Third Gospel to the Lord Jesus 320-344 

CHAPTER VII. 

ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 

Characteristics and Harmonies of the Gospels — The 
unfolding of the Revelation of Christ Jesus as the Son 
of God, and then as the Son of Man — Relations, in this 
point of view, of the Earlier Gospels to the Last — The 
Gospel of St. John — It looks more to the Future than 
the other Gospels, and completes the Evangeliad — The 
Argument in all the Gospels made by the Saviour him- 
self — The unfolding Revelation of Christ Jesus in the 
Gospels follows the same Course as the unfolding of the 
Revelation of Christ Jesus in the Course of events — 
Evidence of the Inspiration of the Gospel in that it is 
the True image and likeness of the Lord 345 -358 

CHAPTER VIII. 

UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 

Special Affinities and Correspondences between the 
Four Gospels, and between parts of the Same Gospel — 
Allusions to the Ascension in the Final Gospel — De- 
scription of the reception of each of the Four Gospels 
in its turn by the Christian Congregation in the city of 
Alexandria 359—367 



INTRODUCTION. 



CONTROVERSY concerning Christ Jesus is 
going on in all the fields of thought, in all 
the walks of life — and he that is not with Him 
is against Him. Every-where there is confession or 
denial of the Eternal Word, who was born of the 
Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate. One 
of the many forms of this controversy is the world- 
wide debate concerning his written word. It began 
with other generations, and it may outlast genera- 
tions yet unborn. Of this strife as to the Bible, the 
Gospels are the center ; and there the Living Word, 
in the appointed time, will gain for his written word 
the battle that he cannot lose. 

Christ's ever-existing Congregation, of its own 
knowledge and memory, affirms that St. Matthew, 
St. Mark, St. Luke and St. John wrote the Gospels ; 
and of its own spiritual consciousness it affirms that 
they were moved to write by the Holy Ghost. 
These affirmations should determine the judgment, 
and they do bind the conscience. It, then, may 
seem irreverent to inquire further into the construe- 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

tion of the holy Gospels ; yet Christians are to "give 
a reason for the faith." That reason must be some- 
what adapted to the unbelief that makes it needful 
to give that reason ; and it is the duty of Christians 
to answer all proper questions concerning the time, 
the writers, and the inspiration of the Gospels. 
Yet such is the insolence of the challenge of infi- 
dels that it is hard to keep from treating it with 
the silence of contempt ; for, making larger demands 
on credulity than pagan priestcraft ever made, they 
would have us believe the double wonder, that the 
ever-existing Congregation of the Lord knows noth- 
ing of her own records, and that of those records 
they know every thing. 

One needs be quick to seize upon what seems to 
them their argument, for capriciously, suddenly, and 
frequently it shifts its ground, moves its dates back- 
ward and forward, and changes its form. Just now 
what they have to say runs thus : The Gospels are 
later than the time of the disciples ; their contra- 
dictions are many ; their character, legendary and 
superstitious. The Epistles are the earliest Chris- 
tian writings. Only four of the thirteen that pass 
for St. Paul's (those to the Galatians, Corinthians, 
and Romans) are indisputably his. The disciples 
never thought of any written memorial of their 
Lord, because they were looking for the end of the 
world. But time went on : pious imaginings of 



INTRODUCTION. 1 5 

what Jesus might have said and might have done 
(sometimes enkindled by what the prophets were 
thought to have foretold) intermingled with what 
Jesus said and did ; and, at length, fragments of 
those traditions were gathered up and written out. 
These private memoranda were of no official or 
sacred character, and they were less valued than 
the common, unwritten tradition. Time went on, 
and more scrap-books were made ; they were more 
prized, and they grew in size. Then unknown 
hands, at unknown times, pasted together these 
fragments of things remembered and of things 
imagined, and — behold! an infidel miracle more as- 
tounding than any Christian miracle — they made 
two of the holy Gospels ! Even so the universe 
was framed by the chance-concurring of unintelli- 
gent atoms — the harmonious universe, written all 
over with forethought and design ! 

They say this hap-hazard gathering together of 
sayings of Jesus and of sayings put into his lips 
was the earliest form of St. Matthew's Gospel. 
Thus, unwittingly, they give the early Christians 
the praise of thinking more of the words than of 
the works of the Lord, save his death on the cross. 
But, dimly seeing that such a divorce of his words 
from his works is incredible, they go on to conject- 
ure that a second form of St. Matthew's Gospel 
was soon made by constructing around his sayings 



1 6 INTRODUCTION. 

a framework of accordant events — truly, another 
astounding miracle ! And some think the first 
Gospel developed itself out of the second. 

In words betraying a dead conscience they say 
that one " honest fraud " was baptized in St. Mat- 
thew's name, and another in the name of St. Mark. 
Out of similar material St. Luke's Gospel was fash- 
ioned, and, with the Acts, was shaped to suit the 
aims of one of the parties among the early Chris- 
tians — that is, the third Gospel and the Acts were 
two political pamphlets. The last Gospel is a re- 
ligious novel composed for " pious purposes " after 
the death of the last apostle ; but, with a com- 
mendable modesty in those who know every thing 
else, they cannot tell who wrote the Gospel of St. 
John, 

To borrow terms from their self-complacent jar- 
gon, " the more advanced " do not " accept " the 
superhuman. Still, their reluctance to own that 
there can be aught that is greater than themselves 
is offset by their readiness to " accept " the degra- 
dation of themselves ; for, with their denial of God, 
there goes a denial of the spiritual, the immortal 
in man, and of all that constitutes the difference 
between men and the brutes, out of whom these 
dehumanized creatures feel that they evolved. 

This is a fair summing up of all that there is in 

the ponderous, multitudinous volumes of the unbe- 
lt 



INTRODUCTION. 1 7 

lief of our time concerning the holy Gospels. With 
this lunacy it is humiliating to contend ! — yet schol- 
ars, in different countries, working long in concert, 
have, contrived to throw around this nonsense an 
air of learning and almost an air of sense. They 
have almost persuaded themselves that the Gospel 
of the Lord Jesus is the fable they wish it were. 
This is their hope, not their conviction ; yet they 
destroy many. Their madness wears " a reasoning 
show;" and some who argue against it countenance 
it by the concessions of wavering faith, of secret 
unbelief, of thirst for celebrity, and of the lack of 
common sense. 

In this volume the results of my thinking are 
often so shaped as to answer some of the charges 
against the Gospels without otherwise alluding to 
them ; but its purpose is a more difficult one. It 
inquires into the construction, the method, of the 
holy Gospels, and into their affinities with each 
other. It treats of the relations between the two 
apostolic Evangelists, St. Matthew and St. John. 
It determines the date of one of the Gospels by an 
original course of investigation. In a word, the 
motive of this volume is to do something toward 
clearing up the question, How did the four Gospels 
come to be, in manner and form, as they are ? What 
is here written could not have been thought out 

without the help of others in all past time, and I 
2 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

hope that in future times others may eliminate 
what there may here be of error, supply what there 
may be of deficiency, and that the truth, so made 
perfect, may abide when I am forgotten. 

Inquiry into the construction of the Gospels meets 
with difficult questions : thus, in the Gospels, there 
is apparently the witness of only two of the Twelve ; 
where is that of the Ten? And why is our Lord's 
ministry in Judea, until the week of his passion, 
passed over by three of the Evangelists ? The an- 
swers here given to these and other questions may 
be of use in the present debate as to the Scriptures; 
and, apart from any transitory worth as defensive 
against assaults upon the Bible that will in time of 
themselves come to nothing, a true insight into the 
construction of the Gospels is of lasting value, be- 
cause of its emphatic, and, at times, surprising con- 
firmation of some of the higher truths of our holy 
religion. 

I hold to the religious worth of this volume with 
the more confidence, because the greater part of its 
material is drawn from the Gospels. If it elucidates 
its subject, it could be drawn from no other source. 
Some few important facts concerning their con- 
struction rest, in the main, on historical evidence, 
though having confirmation from Scripture ; yet I 
think that in the end my friendly and tireless 
reader will be convinced that for a general state- 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

ment this is true : Almost all that can be known of 
the construction of the Gospels comes from the 
Gospels themselves ; tradition adds little to what, 
in one way or another, can be made out from what 
* they hint at or from what they say. 

The Gospels are the monuments of their own 
history. There is no record of their generation ; 
but there they are, eternal as the hills, of whose 
generation there is also no record. The memory 
of man runneth not to the time when the mount- 
ains were brought forth ; yet geologic theory, by 
means of facts inwrought into their fabric, so well 
explains their formation as to be received as their 
true history. In like manner, the true theory of 
the construction of the Gospels may be discovered 
through facts inwrought into themselves. 

Once it was thought that the mountains were 
made by direct volition, no time elapsing, no agen- 
cies employed. We now think differently; and, 
though created mind knows nothing of what crea- 
tion may be in itself, yet hints in nature and in 
revelation encourage man to trace the ongoings of 
the force called into creative action by the Eternal 
Word in those great days described by the Prophet 
Micah as " days of eternity." In those six days 
He made all things through forces by him called 
into being, and put under world-times and laws. 
Science cannot go behind that " beginning" and 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

stand with God in the secret chamber of creative 
energy ; still it can discern the power of the Word 
of God, as manifest through the work of his agen- 
cies, in the forming worlds. This difficult knowl- 
edge of the discoverable ways of the forces through 
which he made the worlds, lessens not our sense of 
the glory of the creating Word who called into 
being the earth and the heavens. In like manner 
our sense of the divine glory, abiding in, and out- 
shining from, the holy Gospels, is heightened by 
wisely tracing there the free-will of man, made sub- 
ject to, and working in harmony with, the will of 
God. ' 



THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



PAET FIEST. 



CHAPTER I. 

OPENING THE WAY. 

tHE significance of a first official act is fore- 
shadowing. Christ Jesus was Son of God and 
Son of man, and his ministry began with two 
official acts pointing onward and opening out in the 
future. On the first of these light falls from the be- 
ginning of the written word. Through the tempta- 
tion of a being of another order, the first pair of the 
true human race, enlightened by the true light, fell 
from innocence ; in that hour of ruin to them and to 
all who should descend from them by ordinary gener- 
ation, there was a mysterious promise of a Redeemer 
of woman born ; and, " in the fullness of time," the 
One foretold as the Son of the Virgin was led into 
the wilderness of Sinai by the Spirit of God to be 
tempted of the devil. His victory over Satan was 
the first official act of the Son of God and Son of 
man, who was made manifest that he might destroy 
the devil and his works. 

When he came up out of the desert the first offi- 
cial act of the Son of God and Son of man was to 



22 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

call witnesses to himself. This he did before he 
preached any sermon, before he wrought any mir- 
acle. Even in the days of the Baptist (though 
some deny this) He had marked out his lines of ac- 
tion. Even in that early time he had in mind fit- 
ting memorials of himself — the living congregation 
and the written word. 

The first official act of his witnesses was of similar 
significance. Their Lord had said, "Ye shall bear 
witness of me, because ye have been with me from 
the beginning;" and, because of their like qualifica- 
tion for the office, the eleven selected Justus and 
Matthias, that one of them might be a chosen wit- 
ness, instead of the traitor, who had gone to his 
own place. The first official act of the Apostles, 
then, proves that it was tneir office to bear witness, 
that Jesus is the Christ ; and (as will be seen here- 
after) the Holy Spirit led them, in fulfilling their 
witness, to record so much of the life of the Lord 
on earth as is written in the four Gospels, and no 
more. 

It is reasonable to hope that on the occasion of 
the choice of Matthias, some of the disciples' ideas 
concerning the fulfilling of their office may (not 
formally perhaps, yet naturally) appear, in what 
was then said, as well as in what was done. And 
St. Peter's saying, that one must be chosen, who, 
with his brethren and himself, should witness to the 
Resurrection, shows that with St. Peter the Resur- 
rection was the pre-eminent sign that Jesus was 
the Christ — as, indeed, Jesus himself had taught 
his disciples. 



MEANING OF THE RESURRECTION. 23 

Here it may be well to inquire into the meaning 
and significance of the Resurrection to the Disciples. 
Of the state of the departed they had the notions 
common to the people of their country and time. 
While their Master's body lay dead in the garden- 
sepulcher they knew he still lived in the spirit, as 
surely as Moses and Elias lived, whom three of them 
had seen. They were familiar with the idea of a 
ghost; and the appearing of their dead Master's 
spirit would have revealed to them only what they 
believed before. They distinguished between such 
an apparition as Samuel's ghost, and a man living 
again. St. Thomas was slow to believe, because he 
knew how great was the wonder of the unhoped- 
for, unlooked-for coming back of Jesus in the flesh. 
Some of its phenomena were ghost-like ; yet at last 
all his Disciples were sure that their Master lived 
again in the body that was crucified ; and, therefore, 
they were sure that he had prevailed over death as 
never man prevailed. His still living in the spirit, 
if it were any victory over death, would have been 
a victory common to all who died. It would have 
been no triumph over the grave befitting the only 
begotten Son of God ; but his coming back as a man 
was such a triumph. 

This witness of the Disciples fully meets the un- 
belief in the Resurrection which takes it to have 
been unreal though it seemed a reality to them. 
That unbelief conjectures that a phantom seemed 
to appear to the over-excited minds of some of 
the friends of the murdered prophet, as to Brutus 
Caesar's ghost appeared, or to Macbeth the air-drawn 



24 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

dagger. Because the hysterical Magdalene thought 
she saw something others thought they saw some- 
thing ; and those stories lost nothing in the telling, 
lost nothing in the lapse of time. Around this in- 
genuity there can be thrown a taking air of superi- 
ority to common superstitions, but it does not meet 
the facts in Scripture or in history. Such an in- 
effectual ghost would only have caused a passing 
spasm of wonder and fright ; and what is most real 
in the world's life came not from unreality. 

The Resurrection meant more to the Disciples 
than that Jesus was alive again. The son of the 
widow of Nain lived again in body and spirit ; so 
did Lazarus; yet they lived subject, as before, to 
the laws of space and time, and to die again and to 
be buried, as other men are buried. The Lord 
lived again in body and spirit, a man ; yet a man 
not subject to the common wants and the common 
lot of humanity. 

The Resurrection meant even more than this to 
his disciples. Christ Jesus took again the life he 
had laid down, and therefore they knew that over 
him the power of death had only been through his 
own will. By his Resurrection he was declared to be 
the Son of God. His resurrection revealed that he 
could deliver from sin, and from death the conse- 
quence of sin. With his resurrection the wonder- 
ing eyes of his disciples began to open to that tri- 
umph of Jesus over both sin and death, which led 
St. Paul to cry out, in words that millions will make 
their own, until the sounds are lost in the good- 
cheer of the last trumpet : " O death ! where is thy 



MEANING OF THE RESURRECTION. 2$ 

sting! The sting of death is sin, but thanks be to 
God who giveth us the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ ! " 

The whole of Christianity is bound up with the 
resurrection of Christ Jesus as a man. His resur- 
rection, when taken with the reason for his life on 
earth, and with the dominion given to the risen 
Christ over things created because he was obedient 
unto death, is prophetic of the dominion to be 
given to the new race of men, who, attaining to the 
resurrection in the likeness of their Redeemer, are 
to be " joint-heirs with Christ." All these things, 
known or foreknown, helped to form the Disciples' 
idea of that Resurrection which was their great evi- 
dence that Jesus was the Son of God ; and it is to 
this Resurrection, (so unknown to their thoughts be- 
fore,) — to this Resurrection of Christ Jesus as a man, 
yet as a man clothed with power over all things in 
heaven and in earth — to this glorious Resurrection 
of Christ, with all its far-reaching consequences to 
all who are born again in his likeness, and to all the 
intelligences of the one indivisible universe — that 
his Disciples testify. Such is the Resurrection that 
was made known to them " by infallible proofs," and 
that may now be known to all by their witness, and 
by the indwelling of Christ in the heart, and by his 
control of all human events. 

The death of Christ Jesus on the cross was wit- 
nessed by men and women who had followed him 
from Galilee, by the citizens of Jerusalem, by the 
Jews who came to the Passover, and by soldiers of 
Rome. His Resurrection was not so open ; but 



26 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

every eye shall see the risen Lord when he comes 
to judge the quick and the dead. Of that hour no 
man knoweth, and until that hour his Resurrection 
will remain a fact that men may receive or may re- 
ject. Of that fact the Disciples are the witnesses 
chosen by Christ himself; and I hold this to be one 
of the first and greatest of questions touching the 
origin and construction of the Gospels, How did the 
Disciples try to prove that fact ? In what did they 
find the evidence of the Resurrection to consist ? 
The true answer, which sets the Gospels in a some- 
what new light, comes from the Apostles them- 
selves, and can be determined only by their words 
and acts. 

Now, what St. Peter said on the occasion of the 
choice of Matthias, proves that the Disciples thought 
that their witness to the Resurrection, in the main, 
consisted of their witness to the life of Christ Jesus 
before his crucifixion. For the chief of the Disciples 
did not say that the new witness must be that one 
of the outer circle who had been most favored with 
the presence of the Crucified ; he did not say he 
must be Cleophas or his companion, with whom the 
risen Christ had talked on the way to Emmaus, and 
to whom He made himself known in the breaking 
of the bread ; he did not say he must be one of 
the five hundred by whom He was seen at once. 
He did not put forward any such qualification. He 
had something different in mind ; for he said that he 
must be chosen from those who had " companied 
with the Disciples all the time that the Lord Jesus 
went in and out among them, even from the bap- 



EVIDENCE OF THE RESURRECTION. 2J 

tism of John." Why from among those f The se- 
quence of his thoughts, and their sweeping clear 
back to the days of John, make it certain that his 
answer to this question would have been, Because 
the life of Jesus before his crucifixion is convincing 
evidence that he could not be holde?i of death. 

Since this is so, skeptics do not understand the 
case made out by the Disciples. The main evidence 
they bring forward to prove their Master risen from 
the dead is not what skeptics take it to be, when 
they say that the testimony to the Resurrection is 
too slight to prove so wonderful a fact. Underly- 
ing this is the reasonable idea that no common testi- 
mony of the senses can establish a fact so out of the 
common course of things. Judging by their tone 
in speaking, for example, of the raising of Lazarus, 
they think that such a phenomenon could only be 
proved, so as to command belief, by a scientific 
commission that should ascertain, by every known 
test, that a man was dead, and then, in the same 
way, that he was alive again. And there is sense 
in this ; for though, concerning such broad and 
easily-ascertainable facts as life and death, common 
observation may be nearly or quite as conclusive as 
scientific experiment, still it may well be doubted 
whether common observation, or scientific experi- 
ment, or both united, could establish to the general 
satisfaction a special fact so out of the general 
course of things as the resurrection of a man. The 
skeptic is right as to the almost insuperable diffi- 
culty of proving the Resurrection of Jesus by the 
testimony of the fallible human senses. He is 



28 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

wrong in thinking this was not as well known to the 
Disciples as to himself; and he is wrong in thinking 
that their main reliance was on such evidence. 

The Chief of the Twelve knew the insufficiency of 
such evidence alone, for he knew the fallibility of the 
human senses as well as any man knows it. As to 
that fallibility St. Peter uttered the coolest opinion 
a man ever uttered. He had seen his Lord trans- 
figured ; he had seen Moses and Elias as they 
talked with Him ; and he no more doubted those 
things than he doubted his own existence. He 
would have denied his own existence as soon as he 
would have denied what he had seen ; and yet, while 
declaring that his testimony to the wonders in the 
Holy Mount was no " cunningly devised fable," he 
said, " Yet we have a more sure word of prophecy." 
That is, the Chief of the Apostles would not trust, 
nor would he have us trust, to the testimony of 
one man of fallible senses, though that man was 
himself, as he trusted, and as he would have us 
trust, in the concurring voices of the whole volume 
of prophecy. 

It is hardly less instructive that St. Matthew, in 
the brief record of all the testimony of the senses 
to the Resurrection that he thought it needful to 
give, mentions that of those who saw and heard the 
risen Christ " some doubted." He must, then, have 
been intelligent of the insufficiency of such testi- 
mony ; and the construction of the last chapter of 
his Gospel proves he knew as well as St. Peter that 
the Resurrection did not rest on such evidence 
alone, and that the evidence of that wonder and 



EVIDENCE OF THE RESURRECTION. 29 

sign only became entirely sufficient when other tes- 
timony of a broader and higher kind was combined 
with that of the senses. 

The disciples were not the " visionaries " that 
some would like to make them out. Of the strong 
and the wise not many are called ; but such are 
called when there is work to be done that only 
the strong and the wise can do. And the natural 
gifts of the Disciples were such that, through the 
enlarging influence of great events, and through 
all the holy influences that wrought within them, 
they could and did become great men, and of a 
greatness the like of which was never known before 
or since. 

And here, while breaking the ground and marking 
the way, let me further illustrate the bearing of this 
study of the Gospels on the questionings of doubt 
and unbelief, by what I find to have been the fact, 
that in the minds of the Evangelists the need of the 
testimony of the senses to the Resurrection was re- 
duced to a minimum by the life of their Lord before 
his crucifixion. " In their light seeing light," that 
life is seen to be testimony to His Resurrection of so 
high an order, that although it does not supersede 
that of the senses, it reduces to the very least the 
need of any such testimony. For a man reading 
the Gospel for the first time, and by grace believing, 
would be almost sure, before he came to the end, 
that if the Lord laid down his life he would take it 
again. The wonder of his Resurrection as a man 
fits exactly the wonder of his life as a man. That 
the Eternal Word, though in the form of man, con- 



30 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

sented unto death, is the most incredible of all 
things ; yet, as he did consent to the dishonor of 
the grave, it is most credible that he rose from the 
grave in the same body that died ; for only by his 
Resurrection in the same body could his victory over 
sin and death be a divinely complete victory. 

In these facts is the reason for what now tries the 
faith of so many, that even the earliest Evangelist 
did not give more of the human evidence of the 
Resurrection. To St. Matthew's mind it may have 
seemed — to his mind, touched by the Spirit, it could 
not but have seemed — that, after what he had writ- 
ten of the life of the Son of God, there was very 
little need of such evidence. And the more the soul 
is in sympathy with St. Matthew, the more it learns 
from him how it ought to feel, the better it under- 
stands his treatment of the time after the crucifixion, 
and the more that treatment commends itself to 
the reason. The resurrection was such an inevi- 
table consequence of the life of the Lord that the 
wise evangelist knew it was needless to accumulate 
other evidence — that to do this would weaken rath- 
er than strengthen the evidence he gave. He knew 
the force of his evident conviction, that, by those to 
whom he had made known the life of the Lord, only 
so little of all the evidence at his command was 
needed. And this feeling on the part of St. Mat- 
thew is an element in his testimony that is of almost 
irresistible power. Every one feels its force, whether 
they understand the nature of it or not. In human 
testimony there can hardly be a greater power than 
the word of such a witness. 



EVIDENCE OF THE RESURRECTION. 3 1 

The reason for the silence of St. Matthew and 
also of St. John, as to the Ascension, is of the same 
kind. They felt that all those who read their Gos- 
pels, without being told would know that the Lord 
from heaven had again ascended into heaven ; and 
the effect of that conviction is the same. 

To St. Matthew the dwelling of the Lord with 
his people in the Spirit, the " Lo, I am with you 
alway," so transcended His departure from them in 
the body, as to make that departure of little mo- 
ment in comparison. He knew that if he then de- 
scribed the Ascension it would lessen the impress- 
iveness of that promise. The reasons for describing 
the Ascension grew stronger with time : the Gospel 
of St. Mark speaks of it, and St. Luke describes it 
twice ; but the earlier Christian generations were in 
such fine accord with St. Matthew's feeling that, 
for four hundred years, they did not keep the festi- 
val of the Ascension. 

In his last short chapter St. Matthew completes 
his proof of the Resurrection ; and there his main 
intent is to give the evidence of the Resurrection in 
the time after the Crucifixion, as, in all his Gospel 
before, he had given the evidence of it in the time 
before the Crucifixion. In that short chapter he 
proves the Resurrection by the testimony of the 
senses, in his characteristic way combining brevity 
and fullness. And in that chapter he also gives fur- 
ther evidence of it. This evidence is, that Christ 
is ever with his people ; and from its being the last 
word of his Gospel, it may, perhaps, be right to 
conclude that he felt it to be his strongest evidence. 



32 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

In that chapter, though his intent be directly to 
prove the Resurrection, he fears not to tell that 
even of the witnesses to the risen Lord some 
doubted ; for he knew there was proof of the Resur- 
rection in the words, " I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world," that surpassed all 
other — a proof that would be personal proof to 
every one of his people, inwrought into their con- 
sciousness, written on their hearts, attested by their 
lives ; a kind of proof that, losing nothing by time, 
would grow stronger to the end of the world. 

St. Paul recites another kind of testimony to the 
risen Lord: how He was seen by Peter, by James 
the Lord's brother, by all the Disciples ; how He 
was seen by five hundred of the brethren at once, 
and by himself. He knew full well the value and 
the need of such testimony of the senses; yet how 
much more satisfying the witness within his own 
soul, when he said, " It is not I that live, but Christ 
who liveth in me !" St. Matthew knew of that kind 
of testimony as well as St. Paul ; and, to make more 
impressive its pre-eminent worth, he did not close 
his Gospel, as otherwise he might well have done, 
with the Ascension. He closed his Gospel with the 
promise of the Lord to dwell forever with his peo- 
ple — a promise to whose fulfillment the holy and 
universal Church doth ever bear witness. He 
closed his Gospel with revealing that for his peo- 
ple Christ forever reigns : " All power is given 
unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, 
and teach all nations, . . . and, lo, I am with you al- 
way, even unto the end of the world." 



DESPAIR OF THE DISCIPLES. 33 

And yet the behavior of the Disciples, while their 
Master's body lay in the sepulcher, so contradicts 
the truth that the life of Christ Jesus before his 
Crucifixion is evidence of his Resurrection, that it 
needs to be well considered. They did not hope 
to see him alive again ; even the favored Three, who 
beheld his glory in the Holy Mount, had no such 
hope. The Jews, remembering something that 
sounded to them like a prediction that he would 
rise again, set a watch over the sepulcher ; but, 
though the Master had more than once told his 
Disciples that he should die and rise again the 
third day, his words were then as if he had not 
said them. 

With a show of reason, skeptics say, that, had 
those words been spoken, there could not have 
been that despair ; and that those oracles must 
have been imagined or devised after the belief in 
his Resurrection sprang up. But in the mental 
states of the Disciples there are veins of psycho- 
logical evidence for the truthfulness of the Gospels 
not as yet worked out. Their relation to their 
Master is not the simple problem it may seem to 
be. It is strange that they could have been so ig- 
norant of Messianic prophecy — but there is such 
ignorance of Messianic prophecy even now. They 
had learned from the prophets that the Messiah 
would be a king ; but not that he would enter on 
his reign through death. That the seed is not 
quickened except it die, which has taught us so 
little, had as yet taught them nothing. They un- 
derstood, even less than we, that the path of life is 
3 



34 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

through the gate-ways of death. The reproof of two 
of the outer circle of his Disciples by the risen Lord 
fitted them all : " O fools, and slow of heart to be- 
lieve all that the prophets have spoken ; ought not 
the Christ to have suffered ? " 

The Disciples thought their Master was to be so 
holy, so wise and great a king, that all the earth in 
him would be blessed, yet still a king like kings of 
the earth. Before them visions passed. " We have 
forsaken all," said Peter; "what shall we have?'* 
Salome asked that when Jesus sat on his throne 
one of her sons might sit on his right hand, the 
other on his left hand ; and the Ten were in a rage 
when they found out that, through their mother's 
solicitation, James and John had secretly tried _ to 
secure the two best places beforehand. All this 
came suddenly to an end. Their selfish, earthly 
hopes and desires were destroyed by their Master's 
unlooked-for death, and their better thoughts, feel- 
ings, and memories went down in the wreck. 

The manifestation of their Lord was compressed 
into a short space of time. They could not keep 
up with its divine swiftness. The contrast between 
what they looked for and what came was too much 
for them. Their souls were prostrate before mar- 
vels too quick, too near, too awful for comprehen- 
sion. When Peter was told to put up his sword he 
could not understand it. His Master seemed to 
have forsaken Himself, and he forsook his Master. 
When Peter swore he did not know the man, what 
he meant as a lie very nearly expressed his own 
feeling, and that of the others, at the time. The 



DESPAIR OF THE DISCIPLES. 35 

helplessness of those children when their Master 
died was as natural as their desertion when he suf- 
fered himself to be led away prisoner. Their de- 
sertion was weakness, not treachery ; their helpless- 
ness was stupefaction, not despair. Their desertion 
does not prove they were destitute of love ; their 
helplessness does not prove that they had no 
faith. 

They no more knew what their Master meant 
when he told them he should die, than little chil- 
dren know what their mother means when she talks 
of her own death. They were afraid to ask the 
meaning of the dark saying. " Lord, it shall not 
be," they said, as some faint glimpse of his purpose 
shone into their minds. Even this passed away. 
They would not, and they could not, understand 
him. Their Master knew this so well that he did 
not try to make them. They would not, they could 
not, think He would die. Surely not then ! surely 
not as he told them ! Whatever his meaning, it 
could not be that. He was in the prime of life, 
not worn by sickness, not bent by time ! and what 
were mortal enemies to Him, whom death obeyed ! 
Some men are so full of vitality that we almost feel 
as if they could not die. The disciples had a simi- 
lar, but stronger, feeling as to their Master. They 
felt that death could have no power over such a 
manner of man ; and there was a depth of wisdom 
in the feeling ! The Lord laid down his life ; no 
man took it from him. The light was so near his 
Disciples as to dazzle their eyes. No men could 
have been at home, at once, in the new world they 



36 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

had entered ; and their bewilderment, though at 
times contrasting strangely with the quickness of 
others, was that of minds struggling to comprehend, 
and is evidence of latent intelligence rather than of 
stupidity. 

These considerations may help us to understand 
the Disciples ; but their bad behavior at the trial of 
their Master, and their despair while his body lay in 
the tomb, cannot be rightly judged, nor their his- 
tory be made consistent, apart from the fact that 
the fullness of the time of the Holy Ghost was not 
till after the resurrection. When I said that the 
life of Christ is convincing evidence of his resurrec- 
tion, I meant that it is so when the Holy Spirit in- 
terprets and makes it real. After the Pentecost 
that life was shown by the Spirit to the Disciples as 
they had not seen it before. They had seen it part 
at a time ; then it was seen as a whole ; then it was 
seen in its true relations to the past and to the fu- 
ture ; and then they knew that Christ came into the 
world to die for the world. 

The change from helplessness to strength, from 
hopelessness to courage, was marvelous ; but equally 
marvelous the sudden enlargement of their knowl- 
edge of what the law foreshadowed and the proph- 
ets foretold of their Master, and the change in their 
ideas of his kingdom. The Disciples were not the 
men they had been. They breathed another at- 
mosphere ; they lived in another world. These 
great changes were brought about by the Resurrec- 
tion and by the coming of the Holy Ghost. As it 
has so often been clearly shown by others, they 



CHANGE IN THE DISCIPLES. 37 

explain, and nothing else can explain, the sudden 
transformation of Disciples into Apostles. 

From the Epistle to the Hebrews, which was 
written while the Temple stood, the suddenness of 
the intellectual change in the Disciples may be in- 
ferred, and also the breadth of that change. That 
Epistle brings out meaning in the old types and 
prophecies of which the Disciples knew little before 
the coming of the Holy Ghost ; and it teaches that 
the Christian religion is the completion of the He- 
brew religion. It is true that, for a time, many 
Christians took themselves to be a Hebrew sect, and 
did not understand that only those Hebrews who 
received Jesus as the Messiah were true to the He- 
brew religion, and that all the Hebrews who rejected 
Christ Jesus (by faith in whom Abraham and the 
prophets were saved) were apostates from the He- 
brew religion. Bitter and long were the birth-pangs 
before the higher spiritual life of Christianity was 
fully severed from Judaism ; and a hankering after 
the ritualism slain by the word spoken at the well 
of Jacob has not withered out of some Christian 
hearts ; yet the Epistle to the Hebrews sets forth 
the faith of the Christian congregation even at the 
time when it was written. 

Now, long before that Epistle to the Hebrews, 
St. Matthew inwrought into his Gospel the truth, 
that in Christ Jesus the prophecy of a suffering 
Messiah, and of the spiritual glory of his kingdom, 
had passed into fact. And, though for three days 
the Disciples were like little children whose souls 
are paralyzed by the look of the dead, still the 



38 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

earliest Gospel proves that, through the power of 
the Holy Spirit, the life of Jesus soon became to 
his Disciples such evidence of his Divinity that, in 
their minds, his Resurrection passed from the roll 
of strange, incredible things into the roll of things 
of course. 



INTENT TO HAVE A WRITTEN GOSPEL. 39 



CHAPTER II. 

INTENT TO HAVE A WRITTEN GOSPEL. 

URELY it was not "the Archangel ruined" 
who deluded men into saying that the Wit- 
nesses never thought of putting their wit- 
ness into writing ! They must have been fooled by 
some imp, like Caliban. Can they prove that the 
alphabet was no more known to Jerusalem than 
before the days of Cadmus to the future Athens? 
Have they found out that the disciples were not 
men of their own race? Have they discovered 
they were not men at all ? These things they 
must discover and prove to give a color even of pos- 
sibility to their words. Men ever try to keep alive 
the memory of the great. The rude barrow as well 
as the obelisk or pyramid testifies to the human 
desire. The recording instinct is a part of the 
human nature, and the savage shows himself to 
be no brute by piling up stones to commemorate a 
chief. 

The ancient genealogies of the people of whom 
the Witnesses were born, prove their record-keep- 
ing habit. Their people treasured up writings that 
were from before Abraham's day ; they treasured 
up, in writing, the family histories of the patriarchs, 
and even the oracles of the false prophet whom 



40 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Moab called from the East to lay an interdict on 
Israel that would kindle up the warlike zeal of its 
enemies into mad fanaticism. 

The unrolling of the Scriptures on every Sabbath 
made the use of books known to the most illiterate 
of that people. In the schools of the synagogues 
they all had the means of learning how to read and 
write. The Witnesses could secure the precision 
and permanency of their witness only by putting it 
in writing ; and yet we are told to believe that they 
never thought of doing so ! The demand awakens 
more of scorn even than of wonder; yet infidels, 
whether misunderstanding or misrepresenting, are 
curiously ingenious in arguing on the wrong side 
of every question — and let them be heard. 

They strangely fancy that they were the first to 
mark that Jesus himself wrote nothing ; and some 
of them intimate that he knew not how to write. 
Their argument requires this ; and all they say of 
the origin of Christianity shows an ignorance of 
Hebrew civilization, dishonors the intelligence of 
the Disciples, and of our Master and theirs. 

They go on to argue that, in spite of the words 
of the angel, " Why stand ye gazing up into heav- 
en?" the Witnesses kept on gazing till not only 
parchment but frail papyrus paper was too lasting 
for a memorial of Him whom they hourly looked to 
see coming as they had seen him go into heaven. 
They should learn how men act now, before ordain- 
ing, in the oracular tone of prophets, how men must 
have acted ages ago. There are some Christians 
now who fix the last Coming within a month or a 



TRADITION OF THE ELDERS. 41 

year, and yet they sign leases, build houses, and 
marry off their children. Like them, some of the 
early Christians fixed the time of the world's end 
too definitely. To such in Corinth St. Paul wrote, 
that a train of events must pass before the last 
Great Day, whose time none could foreknow; and 
his epistle was soon read in all the Christian con- 
gregations. On every side there are persistent mis^ 
representations of their belief; but, certainly, it was 
not such as to prevent their taking thought for the 
morrow. St. Paul was busy with large plans, and 
the march of the Gospel, more rapid than his jour- 
neyings, shows the spirit of the Congregation. 

They give in the tradition of the elders as an- 
other piece of evidence. This is said to have been 
handed down mentor iter from long before the days 
of the disciples until the revolt of the Jews in the 
reign of Hadrian, A. D. 117; then, after the Jews 
were driven out of the Holy Land, this tradition, 
for safe keeping, was entombed in the ten folios of 
the Talmud. But that before this there were no 
secret rolls, for the use of the scribes, is no more to 
be believed on the word of Oriental wonder-loving 
chroniclers, than their equally credible story that 
the whole tradition came down by word of mouth 
from the days of Moses. 

Jewish ecclesiastics took no pay ; but in some in- 
direct ways it was for their profit to dispense their 
traditions to the people, and this was the reason why 
they kept their dissemination in their own hands. 
But in withholding any knowledge from the people 
they went contrary to the spirit of the Hebrew re- 



42 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS 

ligion ; and the children of the Crucified were not in 
a frame of mind to copy the example of the scribes. 
They did not preach for the sake of gold, nor did 
they wish to keep their Master's teachings to them- 
selves. " The Bride," as well as " the Spirit," said, 
" Come," and whosoever would might " come and 
take of the water of life freely." 

As stronger evidence that the Disciples never 
thought of a written Gospel, use is made of some 
curious coincidences that modern research has found 
in the wording of the three earlier Gospels. Every 
one has noticed that in the Gospels of St. Matthew, 
St. Mark, and St. Luke there are parts of verses so 
much alike as to give a common coloring to their 
style. When such verses were laid side by side in 
the Greek, it was seen, (to state the case in a very 
general way) that four or five words were just the 
same, then that some were not the same, and then, 
again, that there were like coincidences and differ- 
ences. In those mosaics pieces of older writings 
seemed to be put together ; but a closer scrutiny 
proved that those coincidences were best accounted 
for by an oral Gospel, that is, a Gospel taught by 
word of mouth. Such is the accepted opinion ; 
still, there are those who think that some of those 
coincidences indicate that the three earlier Evangel- 
ists made some use of common memoranda. 

Skeptics argue that this discovery goes to prove 
that long after the time of the Disciples the Gospels 
were constructed out of traditions : and thus when 
they find, or think they find, a new fact, they always 
set to work. It may be easy to harmonize it with 



WRITING OF THE ORAL GOSPEL. 43 

the truth, but this they never try to do, because 
they never want to. The discovery of those coin- 
cidences can thus be harmonized ; and if the earnest 
thought that has been given to the construction of 
the Gospels since it was made had been given ear- 
lier, the substance of what it made known would 
have been known before. For the Witnesses must 
at once have taught the sacrificial death of the 
Lord, and the evidence of his glorious resurrection 
in his life before his crucifixion, by word of mouth, 
to men and women, as they are now taught to chil- 
dren. Such teaching was called for, at once, by the 
need of the time. Oral teaching has ever been the 
favorite mode of Oriental teaching ; and as children 
like better to hear than to read about the child 
Moses, or about Joseph and his brethren, so the 
early Christians liked better to hear than to read 
the wonderful story. This feeling lasted long ; some 
fifty years after St. John died, the child-like Papias 
confessed that he profited more by what he heard 
than by what he read. 

For a time the Gospel was committed to memory, 
as chapters are now for the Sunday-school, though, of 
course, the mode of learning was different ; and thus 
the Gospel then was universally and thoroughly 
written on the hearts of the old and of the young. 
As manuscripts were costly, and as many of the 
Jewish and more of the Gentile converts could not 
read, such teaching and learning continued for a 
long time ; still this oral Gospel of itself makes it 
quite certain that there was a written apostolic 
Gospel. It was, in fact, a step toward it. For be- 



44 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

fore any one writes out what he has witnessed, he 
questions his own memory, compares his recollec- 
tions with those of others, and makes up his mind 
what to put into his record and what to leave out. 
This is precisely what the twelve witnesses did in 
framing their oral Gospels ; and, in so doing, they 
were, somewhat unconsciously perhaps, yet effectu- 
ally, preparing in the quickest and best way for a 
perfect written Gospel. And their oral Gospels 
must soon have taken on a somewhat fixed, com- 
plete and common form. For the twelve Witnesses 
lived together in the same town with the purpose 
of framing the Gospel, they were busy in recalling 
and arranging its facts, which were fresh in their 
memories, and they heard each other as they taught 
them. 

At that time there were more in Jerusalem who 
could write than there are now ; and among the 
three thousand converts there must have been many 
who could have written out the oral teaching of the 
Witnesses. There must have been some who tried 
to do so; and to think that the writing out of the 
oral Gospel could have been put off till the second 
century is foolish, though some profess to believe 
it. It is so natural that some should have written 
out the Gospel, as they heard it from " the eye-wit- 
nesses" of the Lord, that it would be certain, even 
if St. Luke had not told us, that " many" took this 
''in hand." 

No doubt such transcripts of the apostolic Gospel 
were unsatisfactory ; and the Witnesses must then 
have seen, if they had not seen before — which is not 



WRITING OF THE ORAL GOSPEL. 45 

possible — that it was their duty to have the Gospel 
properly written out by one or more of themselves. 
The re-discovery then of the oral Gospel, which is 
but little more than a clearing up of what the 
Fathers say of ancient tradition, confirms the apos- 
tolic writing of the Gospel. 

Some of the Asiatics thought that a religion and 
a book went together. The Arabian Jews were held 
in more esteem in Arabia because they were " the 
People of the Book." Mohammed availed himself 
of this feeling as to a book-religion. The Koran 
was for him in lieu of miracles. It made the Arabs 
a people with a book, like the Persians and the He- 
brews ; and after they had " the Book of Islam " 
they treated the peoples who had no sacred book 
as utter heathen. I can think of no way of account- 
ing for such facts, save as the wide-spread and 
abiding effect of immemorial veneration for sacred 
writings; such as, in Chaldea, came down to Abra- 
ham from an eye-witness of the judgment of the 
great flood. Those who had failed to keep such 
writings, honored those who had kept them. Those 
who had them, kept them as heir-looms of their 
nationality as well as for their religious worth. The 
feeling as to a book-religion was as rooted with the 
Hebrews as with any of the Asiatics : and its effect 
upon the apostles may be worth thinking of. And 
so, too, the fact that there was less culture in Arabia 
in the days of the camel-driver of Medina than in 
Palestine in the days of the Disciples. 

The full exposure of the error that the Disciples 
could not have thought of writing out the Gospels 



46 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

would require a treatise on the civilization of the 
Jews, bringing out the causes of the mental activity 
among them that is seen in the New Testament. 
The like of this activity there was not among any 
other people. Their familiarity with their Script- 
ures was wonderful, and it was common to all classes, 
Thought among the rabbins was fettered, but the 
thought of the people was more free. 

To the pedants of the capital John was an "igno- 
rant and unlearned man;" and so was Shakspeare 
to the pedants of the court of King James. The 
citizens of the capital jeered at the Galilean brogue 
of Peter; so did the gentry of Edinburgh at the 
broad Scotch of the plowman Burns. The Corsican 
could not write French grammatically, but taught 
French from the mouth of his cannon ; and, though 
he was almost of our own time, scholars wonder 
and blunder over the history he made. In all ages 
and in all countries God ordains that men shall rise 
up from the stones of the street, who, by force of 
their natures, seize, with firm hands, on such appli- 
ances of their time as suit their ends, and with them 
they work out, consciously or unconsciously, the 
purposes of the Lord. 

It is said that in the day and generation of the 
disciples " the literary instinct was not at work 
among the Jews," and yet in the Gospels of Mat- 
thew and John it did the best of work — though, 
happily, this is lost sight of in the truth that their 
Gospels are creations of God, rather than works of 
man. In that generation the literary instinct among 
the Jews did good work such as men may do. 



JEWISH MEN OF LETTERS. 47 

There were then Jewish men of letters : there was 
Justus of Tiberias, whose historical books are lost, 
and the loss is great ; Josephus, who, like Matthew, 
wrote in Greek and Hebrew ; and Philo of Alexan- 
dria, who, like all the apostles save St. Matthew, 
wrote in Greek. How far the culture of Philo bears 
upon the question as to the culture of the Jews of 
Palestine somewhat depends upon the intercourse 
of the Alexandrian Jews with their mother country, 
and it also somewhat depends upon the extent to 
which the Greek language was in use among the 
Jews of Palestine in the days of the Disciples ; it 
is therefore too complicate a matter to be here con- 
sidered : — and it will suffice to say, that one such 
man of letters as Josephus refutes the error that, 
in his time, there was no literary instinct at work 
among the Jews. As showing this, and to give the 
few words concerning his relation to Christian facts 
and records which properly come into this volume, 
I reproduce what I wrote years ago, marking in 
italics some lines that are very pertinent to the 
subject before us. 

The true idea of the character of Josephus is 
not that of good old credulous Whiston, nor is it 
that of the fiery crusader, De Quincey. Josephus 
was no Christian, neither was he half renegade 
and all traitor. He was a politician as adroit, as 
lucky, as Talleyrand. He was a man of letters as 
industrious as Gibbon. His character is not pleas- 
ing, but it may be said, in his defense, that his 
lot was cast in a time when no course could have 
been consistent and right. His sympathies were 



^6 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

with his own people ; but, like the rest of the Jew- 
ish nobles, like even the citizens of Jerusalem, he 
knew that the fanaticism blazing out among the 
country people, if unchecked, would destroy the 
State. And this young, wealthy, and popular noble- 
man accepted the command of the army of Galilee 
with a secret determination to pacify the province, 
or, at least, to keep things as they were until wiser 
counsels should prevail, or the overwhelming array 
of the army of Titus should compel even fanaticism 
to abandon its wild designs. No doubt the cool 
policy which saved only himself is justly odious to 
enthusiastic minds. He should have delivered one 
great battle in the passes of Galilee, or, at least, 
should have died when his brethren died in Jotapata. 
The sympathies of honorable men are not with him, 
but with those who fell in the slaughter at Tarichea 
or at the siege of Gamala, when the Galileans re- 
pulsed the Roman army, Vespasian fighting as in 
his youth, and striving, sword in hand, to rally his 
battalions, hurled down the steep slope of the city 
by the fury of Israel. Such a death would have 
been more heroic than to have come, less as a cap- 
tive than a prince, high in favor with the Emperor, 
before the walls of indignant Jerusalem. And no 
doubt, had the writings of Justus of Tiberias been 
preserved, they would have darkened the fame of 
his rival and enemy, Josephus. But the fact was, 
that this aspiring noble, like the rest of his order, 
saw and felt the desperation of the conflict with 
Rome, and countenanced the popular movement 
only to control it, and to end the war by making it 



CHARACTER OF JOSEPHUS. 49 

as hopeless in seeming as it was in reality. Still, 
his policy cannot be wholly approved. It is the 
more repulsive to the feelings because for him it 
was fortunate ; and but for one great fact, redeem- 
ing all, his character would be devoid of dignity. 
He did not despair of his country when he had no 
country. As a soldier or a politician Josephus is 
not admirable, but his course as a historian verges 
on the sublime ; for just at the time when the eyes 
of the shuddering world are averted with horror 
from the destruction of Jerusalem, he makes a calm, 
learned, majestic appeal to the mind of the world in 
behalf of Israel. Though he had seen his race almost 
perish before his eyes he does not despair of his race ; 
but, with enduring faith in its fortunes, this scholar 
sets himself to win with the pen the battle lost with 
the szuord. He wrote in the universal tongue their 
history, to vindicate for them an honorable place 
among the nations. 

The writings of Josephus were begun and finished 
while he enjoyed the favor of Roman emperors. 
To his history of the Jewish war there was affixed 
the signature of Titus. Yet his writings went forth 
at a time when Hebraic ideas and the Hebraic 
character were detested in Rome ; and writing when 
he did, where he did, and with his aims, there were 
ideas and facts that could find no place in his 
writings. He makes no mention of Christ, none 
of the ancient Jewish belief in the Messiah, neither 
of which could have been unknown to him, and the 
last of which was but too well known to the Ro- 
mans. A knowledge of the religious ideas of their 



5<D THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

subject nations was part of the state-craft of Rome, 
and the sagacious historian felt that, if he would 
avert from his race aught of Roman jealousy, he 
must, in such an hour, be cautious as to that great 
Hope. And he was silent concerning it, seeing 
into what calamities it had led his race, and, per- 
haps, foreboding the calamities it was to bring upon 
them in the time of Hadrian. 

Neither the recondite philosophical ideas of the 
Hebrews, nor their more spiritual ideas, nor even 
the latent causes of the great war with Rome, are 
to be found fully unfolded in this Romanized He- 
braic history ; yet this does not entirely destroy the 
dignity of its intent. Josephus built a monument 
that will outlast the arch of Titus. Though de- 
spised and hated by his countrymen, he was, at heart, 
all Jew. If he received an estate in Judea from 
Vespasian, if he kept the favor of Titus and Do- 
mitian, it was because he meant to be of service to 
his own people. He had the craft, the versatility, 
the enduring courage, of his race. He belonged not 
to the devout of his nation ; he had no more sym- 
pathy with heroic elevation of soul, or with spiritual 
emotions, than Macaulay ; no more conception of 
the glories of the Hebrew religion than Gibbon had 
of the glories of Christianity. He was as graphic 
as the one, as voluminous as the other, and his his- 
tory will outlive theirs. He was the first of those 
Jews who, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem 
wearing a mask, disguising their Hebraic feelings, 
giving no full utterance to their Asiatic ideas, yet 
true, in their hearts, to their own race, have been 



OF ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 5 1 

familiar with palaces, and have had more or less to 
do with the course of events. 

I trust that before my friendly and tireless reader 
comes to the close of this volume he will find the 
question whether the Witnesses meant to put their 
witness in written form settled more conclusively 
than it can be by those general considerations 
showing its probability, to which some thought had 
to be given in the present state of inquiry as to the 
Gospels ; yet it may be well here to refer to one 
piece of direct evidence of this intent of the Apos- 
tles. With intelligence, born of faith in the gov- 
erning of the Most High, the Hebrews placed their 
historic in the same class with their prophetic writ- 
ings. Through all the history as well as through 
the oracles of their sacred book, there ran a fore- 
tokening and a foretelling of Christ Jesus, as he 
told the Jews, when he said, " Your Scriptures tes- 
tify of Me." The burden of the message of their 
sacred book, whether in type, or psalm, or proph- 
ecy, or history, was the Prophet greater than Moses, 
the Messiah to come in the power of God for the 
salvation of his people. Such a book called aloud 
for a book that should recite the fulfilling of itself 
in Christ Jesus, and the construction of his Gospel 
proves that Matthew heard and answered that call. 



52 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE RECEIVED DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 

HE infidel assumption, so madly echoed by 
some of the orthodox divines, that the Apos- 
tles never thought of a written Gospel, is 
made for the purposes of debate. Infidel writers 
see it is needed to open the way for their assump- 
tion that the Gospels are later than, the days of 
those who wrote them. They also assume that 
scholars only can tell whether they are later or not, 
and that they are the only scholars. 

Yet even in those Gospels themselves there is 
some evidence of their date that is as much within 
the reach of one man as of another. Thus, St. 
Luke wrote the Acts after he wrote his Gospel ; in 
his later treatise he brings down the missionary 
life of St. Paul near the time of his martyrdom ; 
but does not speak of that ; hence it is plain 
that St. Luke stopped writing while St. Paul yet 
lived. 

The Gospels now are read in all Christian assem- 
blies, and that such has ever been the usage in all 
past Christian centuries, as far back as A. D. 175, 
(within about seventy-five years after St. John 
died,) is as certain as that the sun shone in those 
centuries. But when we would trace this publi 



THE HUNDRED SILENT YEARS. 53 

reading of the Gospels back to its origin, we find 
that after the burning of Jerusalem there were well 
nigh a hundred busy and luminous years that to us 
are dark and silent years. Within very near the 
time when those warned by the word on Mount 
Olivet fled from the city, the ongoings of Chris- 
tianity, in much of the Roman world, are known 
from the New Testament, and then they are lost to 
sight. The feeling that con>es with the change has 
well been likened to that of the traveler who, jour- 
neying through the gates of a city in a wilderness, 
passes out from the busy life inside the wall into 
the sudden stillness of the desert. 

The conversion of the empire was going on ; but, 
save that the younger Pliny, Proconsul of Bithynia, 
reports to the Emperor Trajan that in his province 
the worship of Christ had taken the place of the 
worship of the gods, the classic writers say nothing 
of the great fact ; and until near the close of the 
second century the relics of Christian literature are 
scanty indeed. The few short letters and other 
documents of the apostolic Fathers could all be 
printed in two columns of a newspaper ; and of all 
the Christian literature of the second century that 
remains, how little is the use in searching into the 
construction of the Gospels can be made plain by a 
single fact : from it all nothing can be learned of 
Theophilus, whether he was a man of rank, as the 
words " most excellent " may imply, or whether, as 
Origen and Ambrose thought, his name, " Lover 
of God," is a symbol pointing to the readers that 
St. Luke had in mind. 



54 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Scholars grope in the darkness of those silent 
years. But at the end of that time the facts do 
away with any cause for regret for that silence and 
darkness, so far as the genuineness and authenticity 
of the Gospels are concerned. With the return of 
clear light the Christians are seen with our four 
Gospels in their hands. As soon as the silence is 
broken the Christians are all heard saying that 
those Gospels came down to them from the apos- 
tles, and in all their assemblies throughout the 
world the Gospels are read with those Hebrew 
Scriptures that were accredited by the Lord. 

Numberless the words and works of the Lord 
unrecorded by his inspired Evangelists, yet no mira- 
cle has come down, no parable, and scarcely a word 
of his, that is not in the Gospels. Even the Epistles 
are as wanting in these as the leaves of the apos- 
tolic or the tomes of the later Fathers. It was the 
will of God that the sayings and doings of his Son 
should be told only by his own Evangelists. It was 
the will of God that even by them much should be 
left untold ; and, with the miracle of silence that 
their Gospels are in the world of thought, there is 
an accordant miracle in the world of history. It 
was forbidden the Evangelists to tell all they knew 
of Jesus, and the same ordaining Will struck out 
forever the whole of that knowledge from the 
memory of man. And the sweep of the decree 
that the Gospels should never be confounded with 
human devices swept away nearly all of the history 
of the twelve Witnesses. Their work abides, their 
witness is in the Gospels, yet the names of some of 



DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 55 

them are disputed, their journeyings are unchron- 
icled, and their burial-places are now forgotten. 

As we stand on this side and look back over the 
chasm, the ground is firm under our feet. The fa- 
thers and mothers of the Christians in the earlier 
half of the second century grew up in the lifetime 
of Apostles, and as late as A. D. 175 a man fifty 
years old might have remembered what his father 
heard from the beloved disciple, and his grand- 
father might have heard the Sermon on the Mount. 
Irenaeus, (A. D. 175,) who bears witness to the use 
of our four Gospels throughout the world, was a 
pupil of Polycarp, who "had known St. John. As 
the public use of the Gospels in the last quarter of 
the second century was universal, it must have be- 
gun much further back. Justin Martyr, the first 
Christian philosopher whose writings have come 
down with any completeness, states in a memorial 
to the Emperor, (A. D. 140,) that Gospels written 
by Apostles and companions of Apostles were read 
with the oracles of the prophets in all the Christian 
assemblies, on every Sabbath day. This witness of 
Justin carries the origin of that usage as far back as 
the time of the death of St. John. 

Let us now take our stand on the farther side of 
the chasm, and mark how the tone of the Apostles 
accords with the height and breadth of their com- 
mission. 

The short General Epistles of Peter speak to all 
classes in a kindly, brotherly way, yet in his precepts 
there is a breath of command like that in the word 
on the Mount. A like breath is in the words of all 



56 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the Apostles. Their writings were from the same 
Spirit with the writings of Moses and the Prophets, 
and they knew it. There is general evidence of 
this in all they wrote ; and there is special evidence 
of it, when the chief Apostle says there are things 
in the Epistles of Paul which some wrest to their 
own destruction as they do the other Scriptures. 
Again: St. Paul, after reminding "his son" Tim- 
othy of the faith of his grandmother Lois, and his 
mother Eunice, and that, from a child, he had been 
taught " the holy Scriptures, which are able to make 
wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ 
Jesus, " passes on, as was natural, from his speaking 
of faith in Christ, to his own writings and what had 
been written by his brethren, or sanctioned by 
them, and says, (when his words are rightly trans- 
lated,) "All Scripture that is given by inspiration 
of God is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness." St. 
Paul never uttered superfluous or needless words, 
and, to the child of Grandmother Lois and Mother 
Eunice, it would have been needless and superfluous 
thus to have spoken of the Hebrew Scripture. 

The apostles never disparaged the gifts of the 
Holy Ghost, given to them alone, by thinking "that 
the Old Testament was a complete Bible, both doc- 
trinally and historically." They wrote with all the 
authority of the prophets. This could not appear 
in those Gospels, that, with reverence for Him who 
is the Truth, were inscribed, not tlie Gospel — for 
that, in its fullness, is the secret of the Father — but 
the Gospel according to St. Matthew or according 



TONE OF THE APOSTLES. 57 

to St. John ; that is, so much of the Gospel as God 
was pleased to make known through men, and in 
part by one and in part by another. In those Gos- 
pels no word was suffered to call thought away, from 
the work God wrought, to his workmen ; but, in 
their other writings, the Apostles declare that they 
write " by the commandment of God our Saviour 
and the Lord Jesus Christ." St. Paul speaks of his 
" Gospel " — which the Fathers say was written out 
by St. Luke — " and the preaching of Christ Jesus," 
of both as " the revelation of the mystery kept secret 
since the world began, but now made manifest ;" 
then, that the Hebrew Scripture might not be un- 
dervalued, he says "it was also manifest by the 
prophets," and that these good tidings, alike new 
and old, "are to be made known to all nations." 
When spoken to in such a tone men will listen ; and 
it is needless to prove, what every one knows from 
their own Epistles, that all the Apostles wrote was 
read by the Christians of that generation, with rev- 
erence and godly fear. 

Were there ready means for writings, thus revered, 
to reach all the congregations then rapidly form- 
ing throughout the Roman world ? At this point 
we again take issue with Westcott. He says, " The 
means of intercourse were slow and precarious," and 
one section of the table of contents, in his " Treatise 
on the Canon," runs thus : " Its formation was im- 
peded by defective communication." Saying, as 
we pass on, that the final decrees of the Church, as 
to all the books of the New Testament, passed upon 
questions that it took longer to decide than any 



58 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

there could have been as to the Gospels, I appeal, 
in proof of the facilities of intercourse in the apos- 
tolic generation, to what is seen of the intercourse 
of Christians in the Acts, in the General and other 
Epistles, and in the messages to the seven Churches 
of Asia. From Athens St. Paul wrote to the Thes- 
salonians that their faith had sounded abroad, not 
only in Achaia and in Macedonia, but in all the world. 
A collection for the Christians in Jerusalem was 
taken up, not only in those two provinces, but in 
Galatia, and in Ephesus in Asia Minor, and in An- 
tioch in Syria. Tidings from the brethren in Cor- 
inth, brought by those of Chloe's household, tid- 
ings from those in Galatia, come to Paul at Ephesus. 
All classes are moving about. An Asiatic slave, 
Onesimus, finds his way to Rome, and is sent back to 
Colosse to his master Philemon. Twenty messages 
are sent by Paul to men and women in Rome, whom 
he must have met with in other parts of the world, 
probably Jews driven out of that city by the edict 
of Claudius, but who had gone back again. Women 
travel as well as men. Phoebe, of Cenchrea, the 
busy port of Corinth, bears Paul's letter to the Ro- 
mans, and they are told to receive her as Christ's 
people should receive their own, and to aid her 
wherein she needed help. 

There were congregations at the four centers — 
Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria. A com- 
mon government and free-trade made intercourse 
throughout the empire such, that the Christians in 
any country could readily send copies of each of 
the Gospels, in its turn, to any other country. Ro- 



INTERCOURSE IN THE ROMAN WORLD. 59 

man energy had made all the provinces accessible 
from all the large cities. In the summer-time oar- 
driven galleys, little dependent on the folly of the 
winds, swiftly crossed the great mid-land sea, and 
recrossed from shore to shore. From the mile- 
stone, still at the capitol, there were roads to the 
borders of the Roman world. Those who have read 
Scott's " Lay of the Last Minstrel " will remember 
the night-ride of William of Deloraine, how man 
and horse struggled on through bog and mire, and 
along cattle-tracks, like the roads in Palestine, till 
they struck the pavement the legions laid, and man 
and horse took courage when 

"Broad and straight before them lay, 
For many a mile, the Roman way." 

Roads still to be traced, like that to the Scottish 
hills, ran throughout Asia Minor, southward along 
the Syrian and African shores to the Arabian Des- 
erts, to the land of the Nile, and eastward to the 
fortresses that watched for the coming of the Par- 
thian horsemen from beyond the Tigris. 

It was a civic world, of clustering cities, towns, 
and villages. Josephus speaks of hundreds of towns 
in the Canton of Galilee, where there was no metro- 
politan city, and whose towns were not closer to- 
gether nor as large as in some other districts of the 
empire. If the world be compared with the Roman 
world, the dangers of travel then were no greater 
than they are now. There were then wild mount- 
ain regions, out-of-the-way places not easily visited 
nor safe ; there were perils of robbers and perils of 



60 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the wilderness ; but over all there was military rule, 
and there was no spot to which, if need were, the 
centurion did not find his way. Traveling is far 
more rapid, but, save for the telegraph, intercom- 
munion now throughout the wider world of Colum- 
bus and Vasco de Gama, is not as quick nor is it 
more constant than it was throughout the world of 
the Caesars. 

Beyond its eastern borders, the multitude of Jews 
in the Chaldean plain and in the Persian highlands 
were known by pilgrimages and annual offerings to 
their countrymen in Jerusalem, until the fall of the 
city ; and long afterward there were constant means 
of intercourse between the congregations in the East 
and the Far-East and those in the Roman world, 
through the channels of the trade of the Orient with 
Egypt and the West. There had then come to pass 
in the earth what the prophet beheld in vision, and 
what now seems coming to pass again on a broader 
scale in the earth. The way was prepared ; in the 
desert was made straight the highway of our .God ; 
every valley exalted, every mountain brought low, 
that all flesh, together, might see the glory of the 
Lord. 

There was no reason why the early intercourse of 
Christians should not have continued in the second 
century, and the little that is known of that dark 
time agrees with what was before and afterward : — as 
seen in the letter from the Romans to the Corinth- 
ians, in the Epistles of Ignatius, and in the recital, by 
the congregation in Smyrna, for the common good, 
of the martyrdom of Polycarp. 



VENERATION FOR THE APOSTLES. 6l 

The next question is, whether the veneration for 
the writings of the Apostles was as great in the fol- 
lowing generations as in their own — greater it could 
not be. And here we are concerned neither with the 
dissensions common to all movements that take hold 
on the souls of men, nor with the tares growing 
among the wheat, but only with the general feeling 
toward the Apostles and for what was written and 
sanctioned by them. Death usually strengthens 
veneration, but it could have added nothing to the 
veneration for the Apostles while living, and it took 
from it nothing. The scanty relics of the literature 
of the early Christian generations abound in evi- 
dence that the apostles were felt to be so apart from 
all others, that their writings came into a class by 
themselves. The tone of the time is that of Igna- 
tius, who says of the Witnesses, they were Apostles, 
and himself, in comparison, as a man condemned. 
The Epistle of Barnabas, written within the verge 
of the first century, and generally ascribed to the 
brother " who took Paul by the hand," was not re- 
ceived into the canon of Scripture because the writer 
was not one of the Apostles, and his Epistle had 
not been sanctioned by them. 

The veneration for the Witnesses was such as made 
it well-nigh impossible that any writing could have 
been generally received, as of equal authority with 
Hebrew Scripture, that was not written or sanctioned 
by them ; and that the second and third Gospels are 
not directly from the chosen Disciples, is evidence 
that they date back to the times of the Disciples. 
St. Mark's Gospel breaks off at the eighth verse of 



62 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

its last chapter, and was finished by another hand ; 
yet this fragment, written by one who was not of 
the chosen witnesses, was held by the Christian 
congregation to be as authoritative as the Gospels 
of St. Matthew and St. John ! The reverence in 
which that Gospel has so long been held veils the 
strangeness of this fact, but the more we look into 
it the stranger it looks ! And as to the third Gos- 
pel also, the facts are so strange, and so indispu- 
table, that if we now heard of them for the first 
time we should neither know how to believe them 
or how to disbelieve them. A physician who was 
of the heathen-born wrote to another of the hea- 
then-born, and the Christian congregation held what 
was written by this doctor to be equal with the Gos- 
pels of St. Matthew and St. John ! Such honor to 
the brethren points back to an early time ; and it 
prophesies of that far-off time when the prayer of 
Moses shall be answered, and all Israel shall be 
kings and priests unto God ! 

Those two manuscripts of Mark and Luke never 
could have been received by the Congregation, as 
equal with the two apostolic Gospels, had not their 
inspiration been attested by one or more of the 
Apostles ; and yet, in a late volume, " On the Be- 
ginnings of Christianity," it is said " that the second 
and third Gospels were ever submitted to apostles 
for their sanction is a proposition which no enlight- 
ened scholar would venture to affirm. " Such en- 
lightenment is darkness ! And, if to deny the 
memory of the Church and the certain deductions 
of common sense from undisputed facts of history, 



DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 63 

be among the insignia of the wise, let me be num- 
bered among the foolish ! 

In any generation the common reception, by the 
Christian congregation, of the four Gospels, as writ- 
ten by those whose names they bear, so presup- 
poses the witness of the apostolic generation to 
those Gospels, that, against this evidence of their 
genuineness and authenticity, nothing worth listen- 
ing to can be said, if the Christians of the apostolic 
generation had honesty enough to pass honestly 
upon a matter where they had no reason or wish or 
opportunity to be dishonest ; and if they had sense 
enough to pass upon that which required only plain 
common sense. 

None sincerely question their honesty; yet there 
is a man, who, speaking of the earlier Christian ages, 
is depraved enough to say that " every thing was 
possible in those obscure epochs." This comes 
from the Parisian Jew who, writing in a city that 
knows less of the Bible than of every thing else, was 
pleased to show his contempt for Parisians by citing 
St. Matthew and St. Luke to prove that Jesus was 
born in Nazareth ! An audacity, that evenly de- 
spises the witness of the holy evangelists and the 
intelligence of his readers, is characteristic of the 
libel he would put off on dull Nazarenes as a Life 
of Jesus. Renan imitates the persuasive ingenuity 
of Dumas, but his master keeps nearer to the possi- 
bilities of things ! The exuberance of the roman- 
cer's glowing African imagination is overmatched 
by the Asiatic mendacity of the historian. 

The Jew spits on the law for a purpose, and the 



64 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

books of Moses become " the late frauds of pietistic 
kings." Now mark his transparent sneer! Jesus, 
whom Renan — forgetting the new city, seen from 
Capernaum, and named Tiberias in honor of the 
Emperor under whom our Lord was crucified — says 
was too stupid to know the name of the Csesar to 
whom tribute was paid — this simple Jesus " thought 
he could do better." 

Renan says, "the disciples invented the miracles 
of Jesus ;" and that he was a party to this by "his 
innocent frauds;" as when he told the guileless 
Nathaniel that he knew his thought when he was 
under the fig-tree. Bad as he was, Renan says, he 
grew worse. His brain gave way; and his eulogist 
screens him from the sin of blasphemy by the plea 
of insanity. Yet he lets him keep enough of craft 
to connive at a deception planned by those sainted 
sisters, Mary and Martha. They made the Jews 
believe their young brother Lazarus was dead ; and 
his coming from the tomb alive was a trick by 
means of which Jesus tried to gain the glory of a 
miracle ! Yet this Renan, with boundless confi- 
dence in the stupidity of the Nazarenes, hails Jesus 
as Master and kisses him : " Jesus is a sublime per- 
son who each day presides over the destinies of 
humanity." These words mock at Jesus and at hu- 
manity ! They do such honor to Jesus as did the 
scepter and the purple robe ! This is the Renan 
whose before-quoted words hint at more than even 
he dared to say, for they mean that " in those ob- 
scure ages" any deception that a Jew can now think 
of was common in the family of Christ ! 



AUTHENTICATION OF THE GOSPELS. 65 

In the reception of some of the twenty-seven 
books of the New Testament throughout the Chris- 
tian world, (that soon had the wide area of the Roman 
world,) there were local uncertainties that show how 
well such things were looked into ; but that which 
accredited the four Gospels was of such supreme im- 
portance, that it must have been at once universally 
made known, and in such a way that it could have 
been reasonably doubted of none. The Apostles 
must have properly made known that, of the four 
Gospels, two were written, and two were sanctioned, 
by them. St. Paul calls attention to his signature, 
directs that his epistles be publicly read, and such 
care leaves no doubt of the proper care of the 
Apostles for documents of even greater importance. 
To think that the Apostles did not take care that 
the Gospels, emanating from them or authorized by 
them, were suitably authenticated and made known 
as such, (with however little of formality and parade,) 
is to charge them with unreasonable, unnatural, and 
gross neglect of their official duty. There could 
have been no uncertainty about the authority of 
the Gospels in the life-time of the Apostles, and as 
their authority was of such common concern and 
was so well attested by the reading of them with 
the Hebrew Scriptures, there could have been none 
after their life-time. 

Their authentication, in each of the congrega- 
tions, only presupposes such thought as is common- 
ly given to matters of public importance ; and it is 
slander to say that the early Christians were not 
intelligent enough to give to it all proper care. For 



66 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the most part, the congregations formed in the days 
of the Apostles were made up, in their beginnings, 
of the finest men of the finest of the ancient races. 
Their choice of an unpopular spiritual religion, in 
spite of prejudices and disadvantages, shows their 
thoughtful character. Many of the Jewish converts 
had sought their fortunes in foreign lands ; they 
had the education common to the wealthier class 
of their countrymen ; travel had sharpened their 
wits, and their minds were enlarged with experience 
of affairs. 

The classic jeering at the Jews proves no more 
than the continental jeering at the British, and they 
cared as little for it. The Jews then looked with 
pride to a capital, that even the Romans said was 
" longe clarissime" far the most illustrious of the 
cities of Asia. They recalled the near glories of their 
war with the Greeks, as glorious as that of the Greeks 
with the Persians. They detested Herod, yet knew 
that he was far the greatest of the subject-kings of 
Rome; and that to his grandson, King Agrippa, 
the Emperor Claudius owed his life and throne. 
They felt something of their power as a people, but 
they were far from knowing it all. For when, a half 
a century after the fall of Jerusalem, the empire put 
forth its strength to crush out the Jews in Judea, 
(only a part of the Jewish race,) so fearful was the 
slaughter of his legions, that the Emperor Hadrian 
could not close his report to the Senate with, "The 
army is well" — the proud word of good cheer that 
in the end of other wars was the formula of Roman 
triumph. In this there was a foreboding of what 



MILITARY POWER OF THE JEWS. 67 

came to pass. For when the sword of divine justice 
cleft Judea, the heart of the Roman world, the body- 
died; and the time came when the Seven Hills were 
without an inhabitant — -like the rock of Zion. 

The last conquest of the Jews tasked all the 
military strength of Rome, yet she then met only a 
fraction of the military power that the Jews could 
have put in the field. Had Jesus suffered himself 
to be a warrior-king, to his banner would have 
gathered the millions of the Jews of the East and 
the Far-East, the millions in Egypt, in Africa ; with 
them would have come their kinsmen of the Desert; 
and, without superhuman aid, they could have pre- 
vailed as swiftly over the whole Roman world as a 
few centuries afterward the children of Ishmael 
alone did prevail over three quarters of that world. 
The dominion Satan offered to Jesus over all king- 
doms, and the glory of them all, was quite within 
the natural possibilities of things. 

Centuries of woe have told upon the strongest, 
the most enduring, of races ; and those who paint 
the Ghettos in cities, where in misery and filth dwell 
those children of Abraham who for ages have suf- 
fered the worst legal and social degradation — who 
overcolor even their wretchedness, not out of spite 
to the Jews, but out of spite to the early converts 
from Judaism — and call it a picture of the Jewish 
quarter in Rome in the days of the Caesars — they 
know history as they know religion. 

In the Christian Scriptures there is no respect of 
persons, yet what may be learned from them and 
from other sources shows that in early Christianity, as 



68 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

in all popular movements that have become lasting, 
there were some aristocrats who brought into it the 
characteristic forethought of their order. In Jeru- 
salem a great company of the priests, in wealthy- 
Corinth the ruler of the synagogue, and in royal 
Antioch the foster brother of the Tetrarch of Gali- 
lee, who, with the prince, was educated at Rome, 
" were obedient unto the faith." In the household 
of Caesar, that city on the Palatine within the great 
city, there were Christians before Paul went to 
Rome. These were Jews in the domestic imperial 
service ; but they were not all Jews. There were 
Christians in the princely household of the Roman 
Narcissus as well as in that of Aristobulus, the 
grandson of Herod. In that generation the wife 
of the Consul Plautus was a believer. Flavins, a 
Roman consul, and cousin to the Emperor Domitian, 
died in the faith, and a burying-ground in the cata- 
combs bears the name of his wife, Flavia Domitilla. 
Prudens, son of a Roman senator, and whose wife 
was a British princess, stayed with St. Paul to the 
last. 

Other such cases might be named, but they were 
isolated and exceptional. It was not the great of 
the earth who heard the missionaries of Jesus 
gladly ; but the slave may be more truly wise than 
his master; the fitness of the promises of God to 
human need and his prophecies of good are more 
readily known and believed by the humble than by 
the proud ; and the highest and truest wisdom there 
was then in the earth, was in the assemblies of the 
Christians, as any one may know by reading the 



NO QUESTION AS TO THE GOSPELS. 69 

General Epistles of St. Peter or those of St. Paul 
Berlin, London, or New York might well be proud 
of one congregation, to whom a letter, like that to 
the Romans or to the Hebrews, might to-day be 
fitly addressed. 

But though, again and again, it is said that the 
early Christian generations were so uncritical and 
unlearned that scholars may set aside their decis- 
ions, yet whether the apostolic generation of Chris- 
tians was a critical or a learned one, has little or 
nothing to do with the validity of their witness to 
the four Gospels. It took no learning to know 
what St. Matthew meant when he said he had 
written a Gospel ; and if the credibility of those 
who said they heard him say so had been in ques- 
tion, a merchant could have settled that as well as 
a scribe. 

But there could have been no question then 
about so public a fact. So, too, there could have 
been no question about such a public fact as that 
St. John wrote a Gospel. Of course that was 
known to the Congregation in Ephesus, and copies 
of it were sent at once to other cities, in whose 
churches it was publicly read. Whether St. Mark 
and St. Luke wrote Gospels that were sanctioned 
by St. Peter, St. Paul, or other apostles, as inspired, 
were not questions then for scholars to decide any 
more than they are now. What the Apostles said, 
that was the evidence of those things. As there 
could have been no better evidence, so there 
could have been no other ; and that such was the 
evidence is proved by the existing use of those 



JO THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Gospels that has come down from the beginning in 
the unbroken succession of Christians. 

Some of those who argue against the true date 
and authorship of the Gospels imagine that these 
are held to be proved by the Fathers, and say the 
Fathers may be good witnesses to things within 
their own knowledge, but their witness to the 
origin of the Gospels is hearsay. Such it is, and, 
being such, of course it differs as to some few de- 
tails of little or no consequence. Still hearsay is 
legal evidence in some cases, and would be legal 
evidence in this case. But while the weight of this 
testimony has sometimes been overestimated, its 
value has been misunderstood by skeptics. Thus, 
to go no further back, the witness of Irenaeus is 
that of a learned man, about facts concerning which 
it was his official duty to be well informed, in which 
he felt great interest, and who was so near to the 
Apostles as to give to his words something of the 
same weight as if he had seen them face to face. 
He was about as far from them in time as we are 
from Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and other 
framers of the Constitution. Our witness to the 
things done by them is hearsay, like his to what 
the Apostles did ; but our witness to the celebration 
of the birthday of Washington, of the Fourth of 
July, and to the Constitution as law in the land, is 
personal testimony, like that of Irenaeus to the 
usages that prove the knowledge and memory of 
the Christian congregation in his day and time. 

Apart from all such evidence, the proof of the 
date and authorship of the four Gospels is such 



OF THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 7 1 

that the testimony of Irenaeus, with the similar but 
earlier testimony of Justin, and with Marcion's mis- 
use of St. Luke's Gospel in the earlier half of the 
second century, and all other facts recorded in 
books of the following century that go to confirm 
that proof, might all be laid out of the case, and it 
would be strong enough without them. The value 
of some facts, concerning the construction of the 
Gospels, handed down from the Fathers as they 
were handed down to them, is inestimable ; but had 
there been a complete, instead of a partial, loss of 
what the Fathers wrote, had not a line of the Chris- 
tian literature of the first five hundred Christian 
years escaped the ravages of the barbarians, still 
there would be not only sufficient but the proper 
evidence for the Gospels in the Gospels themselves, 
in the titles they bear, and in their use to-day in 
the Christian congregation. For it is no more pos- 
sible that any generation, later than the apostolic 
generation, could have received them if they had 
not come to them from the apostolic generation, 
than it would be possible for the Christian congre- 
gation now to receive four Gospels in addition to 
those four that have come down to them in the 
unbroken succession of Christians from the begin- 
ning. As that knowledge and memory of the ori- 
gin and authorship of the Gospels, to which the 
Fathers bear witness, came down to them, so in 
like manner it has come down to this century, 
and in like manner it will go down to the nineteen 
thousandth Christian century, if the world stand so 
long. In every future age, even as now, the Chris- 



72 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

tian usage will make manifest the Christian knowl- 
edge and memory, as it ever has been, and still is, 
written on the living tablet of the heart of the ever- 
existing family of Christ. 

The open and sufficient evidence comes with the 
Christian usage. It cannot be divorced from it. It 
inheres in it. For that usage never could have be- 
gun without good reason. This is so reasonable, so 
plain, so certain, that those who incline to question 
the Gospels should look to their mental and moral 
soundness ; and, if they look deep into their hearts 
they will find that their unbelief springs out of the 
hope that the Gospels are not the authoritative 
word of the Judge of the quick and the dead. 

Unbelievers hide from themselves this prevail- 
ing reason for their unbelief in many ways, only one 
of which can here be noticed. From the way that 
many of them argue, it looks as if, in considering 
the evidence for the Gospel, they chose to forget 
that evidence cannot prove any thing beyond all 
doubt. To self-evident truths and facts evidence 
does not attach; they can neither be proved nor 
doubted. Historic facts, and others that are proved 
by evidence, can be proved only beyond all reasona- 
ble doubt. Beyond that the force of evidence can- 
not go. Yet man is so made that either of these 
two kinds of truths and facts are a sufficient ground 
of action. No man knows that the sun will rise to- 
morrow, or, if it does rise, that he will be here to 
see it, and still the world goes on. Man is so made 
that he is morally bound to treat that which is be- 
yond all reasonable doubt as if it were certain. Such 



EVIDENCE OF THE TRUTH. 73 

is the judgment of the common law ; for, even when 
life hangs on its verdict, the judge charges the jury- 
that they are to hold for certain whatever is proved 
beyond all reasonable doubt, and to act upon it ; 
for, in such cases, what is known to the law as cer- 
tainty has been reached — the highest certainty to 
which evidence can attain. 

Yet in presuming to judge the Scriptures, which 
*' come not to be judged, but to sit in judgment on 
us, " unbelievers are often unwilling to distinguish 
between those two kinds of truths and facts. They 
assume that what God reveals will be so revealed 
that it cannot be doubted ; and they demand that 
the facts of Scripture shall be proved beyond all 
doubt, before they will act upon them. They will 
not inquire whether such be the way of the Lord in 
nature or in life; whether it would consist with his 
training of the soul, or with the freedom of the hu- 
man will ; or whether it be, in all cases, at once 
possible in the nature of things. 

The Lord does give to those who seek for it, in 
the ways of his appointing, the kind of knowledge 
of his truth that the unbeliever thus asks for. The 
Christian attains to it when, of his own conscious- 
ness, he can say, " I know that my Redeemer liv- 
eth ;" but none can have that knowledge who do 
not believe in the Word of God. i Not having it in 
his heart to seek this knowledge, the unbeliever 
tries to quiet his conscience with thinking that if 
any of the facts or truths of Scripture could possi- 
bly have been other than they are, then they can- 
not have been revealed ; and, stranger still) to some 



74 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

of those who think they can thus withdraw certainty 
from the truths and facts of Scripture, certainty 
seems to attach to any thing they think of to put 
in their places ! 

Many of the skeptical writers of our day and gen- 
eration are constitutionally given to doubt ; their 
self-conceit mistakes their mental disease for an 
aptness for finding out truth ; and their hallucina- 
tions bewilder those who take books for oracles. 
But in the question as to the date and authorship 
of the Gospels there is no room for the conceits and 
subtleties of learning, falsely so called. It may be 
well to clear up its perversions of the character of 
the times in which the Gospels were written, and 
of those by whom, and for whom, they were written ; 
it may be well to free the question of the genuine- 
ness and authenticity of the Gospels from side issues 
that have nothing to do with it, from inquiries that 
lead nowhere, from facts that are fancies, and from 
facts of no account ; but, really, it ought not to be 
made a question at all. If it be made such, it is not 
a question for scholars to settle now, any more than 
it was such in the beginning. It is not a question 
where learning is required, but only the common 
sense that God gives, leaving all free to use it to 
their own good, or to abuse it to their own peril and 
harm. And common sense, if it do no violence to 
itself, cannot but dispose of the question at once, by 
treating as sheer impertinence the silly assertion that 
the memory of the ever-existing family of Christ is 
not the sufficient, the proper, evidence of her own 
records. 



THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. 75 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. 
HAVE thus gone rapidly over the evidence for 



1 



the Gospels to prepare for this proposition: 
That the Gospels have come down from the days 
of the Disciples, and were written by those whose 
names they bear, is historically certain ; and, there- 
fore, literary criticism can raise no doubts as to those 
facts, that are of any real force. Literary criticism, 
though a species of historical evidence, is an uncer- 
tain one ; like scholastic criticism, it is often mere 
personal opinion ; and neither can stand against his- 
torical proof. With the genuineness and authenticity 
of the holy Gospels known to be certain, it is safe to 
study them from a literary stand-point. The be- 
ginnings of such study date far back. One of the 
Fathers said: "We do not invite to irrational faith 
in the history of Jesus in the Gospels ; those who 
are to study it need to enter into the design of their 
writers, so that the purpose of each fact may be 
discovered." The Fathers anticipated some of the 
literary inquiries of which modern unbelief would 
take the credit ; but, in times past, reverence re- 
strained from following out such lines of thought. 
Now, the inroads of unbelief make it a Christian 
duty to prove all things, with a freedom not before 



y6 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

called into such fearless exercise ; and only thus 
can some of the charges against the Gospels be an- 
swered ; and thus clearer ideas of some truths that 
the Gospels teach may be gained. 

Christ used the word Evangel. It means the good 
tidings, the glad news — a meaning that, unhappily, 
does not now appear so clearly as it did once in the 
English word Gospel. A wise instinct gave this name 
of Evangels, Good Tidings, Gospels, to the oral 
teachings of the Witnesses when written out by the 
evangelists. Their Gospels were a new thing under 
the sun! Even in the holy Scriptures there was 
nothing like them. What are they ? What is their 
purpose ? Why were they written ? It is needless 
to number up the other answers to these questions, 
for its true answer comes, at once, with unanimity 
of thought and feeling, from out of the heart of the 
whole Christian congregation : The Gospels were 
written that we might be saved. 

The Evangelists bear witness to the truth of this 
answer. St. John said of his own Gospel, it was 
written* that " ye may believe that Jesus is the 
Christ, the Son of God, and, believing, have life 
through His name." The thoughts and feelings, 
common to Matthew and John as Apostles, make it 
sure that St. Matthew's purpose was the same as 
that of his brother Evangelist. Apostles sanctioned 
the second and the third Gospels as inspired. After 

* " These signs are written." See John xx, 30, 31". The words, 
as well as the works of Christ, are signs. And these two verses read 
as if meant for the last words of his Gospel, though St. John added 
a chapter afterward. 



THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. JJ 

each paragraph of the one, St. Peter's confession 
seems to come in like a refrain, " Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the living God;" and the spirit 
of the other is that of St. Paul, " Christ and Him 
crucified." 

The purpose of the holy Gospels is not a literary, 
a scientific, historic, or philosophic purpose. In one 
point of view the Gospels are arguments. The 
Evangelists present only historic facts. They trust 
those facts to speak for themselves. What ought 
to be learned from them is left to every one's con- 
science. No persuasive eloquence goes with the 
facts, no reasoning defends them, no word explains. 
Yet their Gospels are arguments to prove that Christ 
Jesus is the Son of God who taketh away the sin of 
the world ; and the Evangelists establish this fact, 
that believing in Christ Jesus we may have life 
through his name. 

One of the lesser consequences of their purpose 
is, that all the infidel critics of such writings must 
be put out of court. However skillful in the use of 
their art in the literatures of the kingdom of this 
world, they are baffled in trying to use their skill 
upon writings that pertain to the kingdom not of 
this world. What appreciation can there be of 
what men are doing, unless there be some little 
sympathy with their purpose ? There can be none. 
And these critics have no sympathy with the pur- 
pose of the inspired Evangelists. They have no 
adequate idea of it, and they can have none. Sal- 
vation is to them vague, unreal ; a pleasant illusion 
for those who have nothing in this world ; a super- 



78 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

stition that serves to check the passions of the pop- 
ulace and can adroitly be turned to aristocratic 
ends, yet to be despised as vulgar or dreaded as 
fanatical ; the belief of no scholar and no gentleman, 
though some argue for it professionally. To such 
critics the idea of salvation is no more known, than 
the idea of culture to a savage. 

Herein is the philosophy of the fact that their 
criticism of the Scriptures, that make wise unto sal- 
vation, is so worthless. No gold, no jewels, can be 
dug out of that Babylonian mound. They take 
their fancies for facts, they twist facts, they misun- 
derstand, they misapply facts ; and ever to trust 
them is to be deceived. Yet unwittingly, and against 
their will, they are of some little use. For, where 
the skeptic's finger points in scorn, there treasure is 
concealed. As these sorcerers go up and down, 
peering about, muttering their curses and weaving 
their spells in the holy land, the divining rods, in 
their unhallowed hands, bend downward, where, be- 
neath the surface, are hidden veins of water and 
seeds of gold. 

As facts in the life of the Lord are the evidence 
his Evangelists give of the truth their Gospels es- 
tablish, it might be supposed that they would give 
facts on .facts, till no more could be given ; yet, 
save in the week of the Passion, there are wide 
spaces of silence in all the Gospels. They all pass 
over months without a line. In the three earlier 
Gospels there are such general statements as this, 
" Jesus went about teach'' ng and healing." At the 



THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. 79 

close of his Gospel St. John states that so many- 
were the things done by the Lord that all could not 
be written ; and what the last evangelist said could 
not be done, none of the earlier evangelists ever 
thought of doing. 

Manuscripts were costly, their copying was slow. 
The unrolling of the long scrolls was unhandy, and, 
written without punctuation, the reading of them 
was difficult. They were to be committed to mem- 
ory (as was much the custom) rather than to be 
read as books are now read ; hence the Gospels 
were written (as, indeed, all ancient books) with 
conciseness. Those things were a check in select- 
ing facts for the oral Gospel also, which, even more 
than the written Gospel, the congregation was ex- 
pected to learn by heart. And yet beyond these 
reasons lie the true reasons for the brevity and 
reserve of the Gospels. 

There is nothing like the purpose of the inspired 
Evangelists in the world of thought ; and in the 
world of letters there is nothing just like their meth- 
od. Their aim is so sacred that the following illus- 
tration is hardly permissible ; yet to clear up the 
subject is so desirable, that, if it help even a little, it 
may be pardoned if we suppose that four men un- 
dertook to write out the evidence that a certain 
man, known to two of them, and known to the 
others through trustworthy witnesses, was a fit per- 
son to be President of the United States ; and that, 
as evidence of this fitness, each sets forth facts from 
his history, without note or comment. Each tries 
to give the means of forming a true idea of the 



80 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

man. Their method, then, is fair — the most fair 
that can be thought of. It shows their spirit is 
fearless as well as fair : for it leaves the man to be 
judged, not by what they think about him, but by 
what he, himself, has said and done. Their four 
portraits are, unmistakably, portraits of the same 
person, but they are drawn with such freedom that 
they are not just alike ; and the likeness comes out 
better from them all than from one alone. Each 
makes a selection of facts somewhat different from 
the others. Where the same facts are given each 
sets them in a somewhat different light, and each 
thinks he gives facts enough. They naturally fol- 
low, more or less, the order of time, thus giving 
some clew to that order ; but this is not done in all 
cases, nor would all their narratives, if combined, 
make a biography. There would be breaks in the 
chronology ; facts of a common kind would be 
brought together, whether they happened together 
or not ; and it might be as impossible to make out, 
from such records, the exact time and place of each 
and every anecdote and event as it would be need- 
less for the end their writers had in view. 

This illustration of the method of the holy Evan- 
gelists, though inadequate, yet shows the worthless- 
ness of the adverse criticism of the Gospel, that pro- 
ceeds upon the error (as much of it does) that the 
Gospels were biographies. A Gospel and a biogra- 
phy have some things in common, so have a Gos- 
pel and a history ; and at times it may be conve- 
nient to call them such, but it misleads, it confuses 
and confounds. A Gospel, in its purpose and in its 



THE PURPOSE OF THE GOSPELS. 8l 

method, is as different from a biography as the life 
of the Lord is unlike the lives of men. The writer 
of a biography thinks he knows a man well — better, 
perhaps, than he knew himself — and, to make that 
man as well known to others, he tries to tell all that 
he knows. Such is the feeling, the purpose, with 
which he goes about his work ; but such was not 
the feeling or the purpose of the holy Evangelists. 
Matthew and John testified to what they had seen 
and heard. They would have given up their lives 
to make the Lord known to others as he was known 
to them, but they knew there was much they did 
not and could not know of him. He, himself, had 
said, " No man knoweth the Son but the Father." 
They are silent about very much that they did know 
of the life of the Lord, and the mercy of God is in 
their silence. . He suffered not the Witnesses to his 
Son to be over-anxious to accumulate evidence that 
his is the only name given under heaven, among 
men, whereby they can be saved, for more evidence 
would not avail for the salvation of those who reject 
the evidence they give. By his will the evangelists 
stopped short of telling all they might have told — 
they were content to make the truth certain. 

As long as the limitation of the purpose of the 
Evangelists is not well understood, the construction 
of the Gospels seems to give some countenance to 
the theory that they are made up of fragmentary 
facts, interspersed with myths and legends. Such a 
theory accounts for any breaks, any chronological 
disorder, any difference there may seem to be in the 



82 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Gospels, with a plausibility that will be delusive 
and dangerous until a satisfactory explanation is 
given of how the Gospels came to be as they are. 

Before attempting to give such an explanation, it 
may be well to glance at the theory just spoken of. 
Between the mythical and the legendary the differ- 
ence is a shadowy one ; but as the period of the 
myth is prehistoric, there is nothing that can strict- 
ly be called mythical in the Gospels. Every thing 
in them to which that term has been given might be 
covered by the word legendary; but the word myth- 
ical, by a special adaptation, was applied to the 
gospel narratives, because a mythical element was 
said to have entered into them in consequence of 
the Hebrew belief that the Prophets foretold a 
Coming Man ; and this is said to have kindled the 
imagination, to see its fulfillment in Jesus. But a 
predictive element was thus conceded to Hebrew 
Scripture, which after a time it became so conven- 
ient to deny, that the mythical theory went out of 
favor with those who brought it in. For this, and 
for better reasons, it has become a thing of the past. 

In the nature of the legend there is something of 
the unreal, the fantastic, the childish : there is noth- 
ing of this kind in the Gospels. Myth and legend 
would have told marvelous tales of the childhood of 
Jesus, such as are told in the apocryphal Gospels. 
Neither myth nor legend would have shunned the 
thirty shaded years of the life of Jesus and chosen 
the broad daylight of his ministry; and neither myth 
nor legend would have kept away, as did the three 
earlier Gospels, from the Holy City, the Temple- 



NEANDER AND STRAUSS. 83 

courts, and the hill that was religious even before 
Abraham went there to offer up his son. 

The fragmentary theory has taken the places of 
the mythical and the legendary theories. For the 
" seamless coat woven of one piece" this theory 
offers garments tattered and torn ; and it should be 
known as the ragged theory. One example will 
suffice to show something of its character. When 
(A. D. 1835) the government of Prussia consulted 
with Neander concerning the prohibition of Strauss' 
" Life of Jesus," his effectual counsel against it was 
in accord with Jefferson's saying, " that error may 
be safely left free, if truth be free to combat with 
it." Neander, called upon by the evangelical in 
Germany, made a reply to Strauss, the first of many, 
and second to none in power. Some of the sen- 
tences in his " Life of Christ" are seed-grains, out 
of which books have grown that have rightly made 
their authors famous. Neander was devout, yet he 
took up with the notion that the Gospels are " frag- 
ments ;" and he showed, at once, to what errors this 
pitiful conception of their character leads. He pro- 
nounced St. Matthew's statement that Pharisees 
and Sadducees came to hear John the Baptist 
" unhistorical" on the ground that "it is improb- 
able that men of the peculiar religious opinions of 
the Sadducees should have been attracted by the 
preacher of repentance." This must seem strange 
to the English-speaking race, who know how men of 
every creed and calling — Freethinkers, Quakers, and 
Churchmen, ladies of quality, sinners and saints, 
swarthy coal-blackened miners, and men of fashion, 



84 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Franklin the philosopher, and Foote the actor — 
went out to hear the field-preaching of the eloquent 
Whitefield. In this fair specimen of the criticism 
that questions the accuracy of the Evangelists, Ne- 
ander treats their witness as Strauss constantly did. 
Neander gave it much the most credence; but, if 
facts in the Gospels may thus be set aside, who shall 
draw the line, and where can the line be drawn ? 

Neander was a man of multifarious reading; his 
"Church History" shows a marvelous power of 
tracing the evolvement of thought from thought ; 
but in practical knowledge he had but the quick- 
ness and simplicity of a child. The well-built, rect- 
angular city of Berlin seemed to him, like the Gos- 
pels, "a collection of fragments;" and for twenty 
years he could never find his way, without guid- 
ance, from his house to his lecture-room in the 
University. His book is far better than could have 
been hoped for with the error that vitiates it ; but 
in the half-century since Neander took a course 
which for the moment seemed an effectual one, 
there has been a growing disposition, among the 
orthodox, to treat the Gospels as he did — as seen 
in Tholuck in Germany, in Alford in England, in 
Pressense in France ; and there has been a grow- 
ing disposition in the world to give up the historic 
credibility of the Holy Gospels. 

The fragmentary theory throws a tempting bridge 
over the deep chasm that separates the high and 
firm ground of the Gospels from the quagmire and 
marsh of tradition ; and thus it may be that even 
so judicious a man as Ellicott was led on to say 



MYTHICAL AND LEGENDARY THEORY. 85 

that, " perhaps, at the baptism was seen the kindled 
fire over the Jordan of which an old writer has made 
mention !" The fragmentary theory opens the way 
again for the mythical and legendary theories. It 
disguises them in itself; for fragments of sacred 
traditions are, naturally, more or less mythical and 
legendary ; and so those theories return, with a plau- 
sibility they had not when presented, as if they, of 
themselves, cleared up the structure of the Gospels. 
Those who fully receive the fragmentary theory and 
still think to keep the faith as it is in Jesus, do not 
see how they are giving away the battle, as to the 
mythical and legendary, after it has been won ; and 
I think that, without seeming to know it, those 
semi-orthodox have marched over into the enemy's 
camp, to find themselves prisoners, with all their 
baggage and material of war. 

Yet the ragged theory, when steadily looked at, 
goes out of sight. One fact is enough to drive it off. 
If the three earlier Gospels were gathered-up frag- 
ments, there would have been some gathered-up frag- 
ments from the ministry in Judea. Our Lord alluded 
to that ministry, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how 
often!" — this outburst of feeling, twice repeated, 
has a place in the first and in the third Gospels, yet 
neither in them, nor in the second Gospel, is there 
any word or miracle from that ministry. This kills 
the ragged theory. For, were the first of those 
Gospels made up of fragments, picked up after the 
days of the Witnesses, it would be very strange that 
some of them should not have been picked up in 
Judea as well as in Galilee. It is incredible that 



86 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

what is so unlikely should have happened, by chance, 
for the second time, and it is impossible that it 
could have so happened for the third time. There 
must have been a purpose in the beginning and 
continuing of this silence of St. Matthew, St. Mark, 
and St. Luke. It was the silence of design, and I 
think we shall be able to find its reason ; but 
whether we can or not, on the fragmentary theory 
there is no reason for it at all. Whatever be the 
truth as to the construction of the Gospels, the 
ragged theory, like the mythical and the legendary, 
cannot be true. 

Yet without hesitation, and without timidity, it 
is to be frankly said that, at some few points, the 
Gospels have rather a fragmentary look. Almost 
all of this disappears as soon as a clear view is 
gained of the limitations of their purpose ; yet there 
is something to be done before all the special and 
general facts that, here and there, give them a little 
of this aspect, can be cleared up. Of such special 
facts we give these two examples. St. Matthew is 
silent concerning his noble townsman, whose son 
was healed, and who, with all his house, believed ; 
so is St. Mark, though St. Peter also lived in Ca- 
pernaum ; and so is St. Luke. The field of their 
Gospels was Galilee, yet this Galilean miracle comes 
out only in the last Gospel, whose field was Ju'dea. 
Again, St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke all tell 
of Jairus' daughter, while only St. Luke tells of the 
son of the widow of Nain. 

Besides such minor perplexities there are those 
of greater breadth ; and though the unity of each 



UNITY OF THE GOSPELS. 87 

Gospel and the unity of the Gospels as a whole 
readily disprove the sweeping charge that the Gos- 
pels are fragments, yet no single principle will 
guide through all the intricacies of their construc- 
tion. Even to approximate to the solution of that 
problem several lines of thought must be combined, 
and different kinds of facts and truths must be con- 
sidered. 



88 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ORAL AND WRITTEN GOSPELS. 

tHE origin and construction of the Gospels is a 
problem that has so many sides that we can- 
not give to this volume all the unity that 
could be desired, nor can each of the arguments, 
that go to make up its whole argument, T^e, at once, 
complete by itself. Thus this chapter is given to a 
discussion in which the Oral Gospel, before touched 
upon, is further considered. 

The writers of two of the four Gospels were not 
of the chosen Witnesses, yet the Christian congre- 
gation holds that in those four Gospels there is the 
witness of all the Apostles ; but how can it be? 
The witness of two is there, but where is that of 
the others ? The witness of St. Matthew and St. 
John is there, but where is the witness of St. An- 
drew, of St. Thomas ? And where is that of the 
Apostle Paul ? In this case, faith seems to supply, 
in the Christian congregation, the lack of knowl- 
edge ; and if it did, it would supply it well; but 
what may here seem to be faith is really a knowl- 
edge of the facts that, from the days of the disciples 
until now, has lived on in the memory of the ever- 
existing Church, while the explanation or reason 
of what now seems strange has been forgotten. 



THE ORAL GOSPEL. 89 

And the like of this has sometimes happened as to 
time-honored institutions and ancient laws. 

The lost explanation will close up a gap in the 
moldered wall of the city of Zion, through which 
deluding phantoms glide. Infidels can say, with 
some show of reason, that the inability to prove 
that the witness of all the Apostles is in the four 
Gospels is equivalent to a confession that it is not 
there ; and it is trying to Christians not to be able 
to give an intelligent answer to the cry of their 
own hearts, Where is the witness of the other ten 
Apostles ? Where is that of the apostle Paul ? Are 
they lost forever ? 

To these inquiries the answer will, in part, be 
found in what may be learned of the affinities of 
the oral Gospels with the written Gospel. Let 
us then recall what has already been said of the 
oral Gospels or Gospel, and try to gain a full, clear, 
and true idea of how they came to be, and of what 
it was composed. Each apostle preached and 
taught in his own way, which, of course, differed 
from that of the others, and it differed in different 
circumstances ; yet their oral Gospels all had the 
same purpose, and, from time to time, they heard 
each other as they preached and taught. The great 
truths in their oral Gospels were the same : the 
divine nature of Christ, his sacrificial death, and 
his taking again the life he laid down ; and it can 
be proved that, in their oral Gospels, the facts se- 
lected from the life of Christ were much the same 
facts. 

Almost all our direct knowledge of what the 



90 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Apostles did while in Jerusalem comes from the 
Acts ; and in that book the signs of their oral 
teaching are not as marked as might be looked for. 
But it is not known that St. Luke was ever in that 
city in the earlier part of that time ; of some of the 
things then and there done, his informant may have 
been Saul — thus, the report of Gamaliel's speech 
probably came from him, for Saul was a member of 
the Sanhedrim ; yet of much that the Apostles were 
doing the unconverted Saul may have known noth- 
ing. But it is more pertinent to the matter that 
every-where among the Christians the oral teaching 
of the Gospel had become a well-known usage, for 
common things are apt to be overlooked. 

And on carefully studying St. Luke's words allu- 
sions to oral teaching are seen which are more de- 
cisive in the Greek than in our English translation. 
The converts at the great Pentecost " continued 
steadfastly in the Apostles' doctrine" — ry dtdaxrj 
rav amooTo'kuv : continued steadfastly attentive to 
the teaching of the Apostles, is closer to the mean- 
ing. Again, " With great power gave the Apostles 
witness of the resurrection," that is, the great power 
of the Spirit went with their witness. As before 
shown, their witness to the resurrection was mainly 
their testimony to the life of their Lord, and the 
meaning of the word (to fiaprvpiov*) witness is more 
specific than it is in the translation, for the Greek 
word points to a fixed, definite form of testimony. 

* Here the word is neuter. When its sense is general it is 
commonly, in the Greek, feminine, and such the New Testament 
usage. 



THE ORAL GOSPEL. 9 1 

And, in passing, it may be worth while to note that 
the Greek word translated preaching meant herald- 
ing ; now a herald's message is fixed for him, both 
in form and words, and from it he is not to vary in 
the least. 

In Jerusalem the teaching emanating from the 
twelve disciples must have taken on a somewhat 
fixed and common form. Not rigidly such ; it was 
not word for word, just the same every-where, or 
every time ; yet it was such that, on the whole, it 
may be properly spoken of as one and the same ; 
and this is what I mean by the Oral Gospel, or, 
more exactly, the Oral Teaching of the Apostles. 

Their oral teaching was a recital of the life of 
Christ Jesus, of his crucifixion, and his resurrection ; 
and that this was most faithfully taught and dili- 
gently learned by the congregations every-where is 
proved by the Epistles. To our knowledge of the 
words of our Lord, the Epistles add only the line, 
" It is more blessed to give than to receive ; " and 
to our knowledge of his miracles, they add not one. 
Though written to so many congregations, so wide 
apart, and though one of them was from James, the 
Lord's brother, there is not in them all one single 
reference to any of the numberless events in the 
ministry of Christ, such as the raising of the widow's 
son, the stilling of the storm, or the cure of the de- 
moniacs. Hence it is certain that the memoriter 
oral teaching had done its perfect work in those 
congregations to which the Epistles were written, 
some of which were addressed to all the Churches : 
for the only reason there can be for this surprising 



92 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

silence is that in the congregation there was a per- 
fect knowledge of the life of the Lord, as now in 
sermons there often is a like silence, because the 
preacher is sure that his hearers know what their 
Lord said and did. This luminous fact in the Epis- 
tles lights up the apostolic world ; it shows that in 
knowledge of the facts of the life of the Lord the 
converts were perfect, wanting nothing. Never, 
since those days, has the life of the Lord been so 
fully written on the hearts of his people, and when 
it shall again be so written the Gospel will again 
conquer the world. 

The oral teaching could not have been given to 
the converts all at once. It was taught in sections, 
and probably those containing the Crucifixion and 
the Resurrection were given out first. This was so 
in the oral teaching of St. Paul. To the Corinth- 
ians — a congregation with whom he lived two years 
or more — he writes, " I delivered unto you, first 
of all, how that Christ died for our sins, and that 
he was buried and rose again the third day : " — but 
his going on to recite to them some of the facts in 
the first section of his oral Gospel does not at all 
contradict the uniform assumption in the Epistles 
of the perfect knowledge in the congregation of the 
life of the Lord, for the Apostle simply gives weight 
to his argument by recalling to them facts they 
knew, such as that the Lord was seen by Peter, by 
James, and by himself. 

Of such sections the converts learned by heart 
what they could — some less, some more. Some 
tried to write down this oral teaching, and to put 



THE ORAL GOSPEL. 93 

its sections fitly together. This is what St. Luke 
means when he says that many undertook to set 
forth in order (that is, in its time-order) what was 
delivered by the eye-witnesses of the Word. 

It was given to Gieseler earlier than to any one else 
with equal clearness, to see what the coincidences 
in the first three Gospels indicate of the true rela- 
tions of the oral to the written Gospel. That was 
sixty years ago, (A. D. 1 8 1 8 ;) and so much of the 
controversy as to the Gospels has since turned upon 
the oral Gospel, that it is strange there has been so 
little appreciation of the difficulties there were in 
framing the oral Gospel ; but, then, little thought 
has ever been given to the difficulties in framing 
the written Gospel. To Christians the Gospels 
seem to have come up like flowers or trees from 
some life-principle within, so perfect in its working 
that they have been content to call it God's work. 
To this truth the soul, after all its searching into 
the human element in the Gospels, returns in thank- 
fulness, and there rests in peace. But that it may 
rest there with a peace never more to be troubled, 
it needs to know all that can be known of the hu- 
man element in the Gospels. True insight into 
the human nature of Christ, the Living Word, con- 
duces much to faith in His divine nature, and the 
like is true of his Written Word. 

On thinking of the framing of the Oral and also 
of the Written Gospel, it may seem to have been an 
easier thing than it was. My first thought was that 
oral teaching of the three thousand was some such 
recital of the sayings and doings of the Lord as a 



94 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

missionary makes to the heathen ; but the resem- 
blance is a superficial and misleading resemblance. 
The missionary merely translates what the disciples 
made ready for him ; but their work in Jerusalem 
was the finest and most difficult piece of work that 
men ever did. Pressense ridicules the idea of " an 
official editing " of the oral Gospel by an apostolic 
college, holding sessions in the Holy City ; and, 
truly, we may as well think the disciples had a staff 
of short-hand writers and proof-readers, as to sup- 
pose that they went about framing the oral Gospel 
with all the ceremonial pomp of a General Council 
in later imperial ages. But, still, it may as well be 
denied that there was any Jerusalem, any Witnesses, 
any Gospel, oral or written, as that the oral Gospel, 
the condition precedent of the written Gospel, was 
the difficult achievement of all the disciples. 

It may be thought a simple and easy thing for 
them to tell what they knew ; but was it so easy to 
tell it as they told it ? Is it so simple a thing to 
form a true idea of any man ? Is not the power of 
drawing a speaking likeness of man or woman, the 
rarest gift of literary genius ? Was it so simple and 
easy to form, and to convey to others, a true idea of 
such a manner of man as the Lord from heaven ? 
a true idea of Him who was not only of a new race, 
but the life of that new creation ? a true idea of 
the Son of man and Son of God, in whom two na- 
tures were united that were wider apart than the 
ends of the universe ? 

In framing the oral Gospel the disciples had 
nothing in their own literature to guide them ; but, 



SILENCE OF THE EVANGELISTS. 95 

had they known all the literatures before or since, 
it would not have helped them. They wrought out 
what would have been the greatest of all wonders in 
the world of letters, had it not been wrought in a 
different world and by the help of another Energy : 
but in saying this, thought runs forward and em- 
braces in one idea the written with the oral Gospel. 
For, through their oral Gospel, all the disciples con- 
tributed to the perfection of that written Gospel in 
whose likeness of Him whom men could not fully 
comprehend nor rightly describe, the promise of the 
Lord was fulfilled — " In you the Holy Ghost shall 
glorify me." 

Portrait-painters fail of a likeness when they try 
to put too much on their canvas ; and the truth 
and effectiveness of the disciples' portraiture of their 
Lord as really depended on their silence as on their 
speech. The difficulty of leaving out was never so 
difficult, for never was every thing so worthy of 
being put in ; but here the oral Gospel set the pat- 
tern that the evangelists copied. The Apostles felt 
there was no need to strengthen the evidence they 
gave — no need to bring all the truth into the field. 
This is plain from their choosing so few out of a 
great multitude of facts. The same feeling is man- 
ifest in the writings of the Evangelists, and they 
obeyed the law the Apostles laid down. That feel- 
ing is one of the secrets of the influence of their 
Gospels, though it gives the fragmentary appearance 
they have in the eyes of critics who cannot see that 
the drawing of a portrait is not the compiling of a 
biography or the writing of a history. 



g6 thoughts on the holy gospels. 

That the Lord's ordaining will was in the course 
that was taken by the Apostles in the framing of the 
oral Gospel and which was copied by the Evangel- 
ists in the written Gospel, is seen in his promise — 
"The Comforter, the Holy Ghost, shall teach you all 
things, and bring all things to your remembrance, 
whatsoever I have said unto you." This promise 
was more specific than it is in our version. The word 
rendered bring to remembrance (ynofivrjoei) means 
to suggest ; and hence the meaning of the promise 
is, that the Holy Spirit would suggest to them so 
much of what he had said as would give them a 
true idea of the whole of it — somewhat as when a 
master-builder, having talked at length with his 
head-workmen about his plans and wishes, then 
clears up the whole by a few emphatic words that 
tell them just what to do, and fix in their minds 
the sum and substance of it all. 

In their silence, as in their speech, the Disciples 
and the Evangelists were guided by divine wisdom ; 
but they had to decide some things that were, per- 
haps, more within the scope of their own judgment. 
Such may have been the question in what language 
the Gospel should be written. This question was 
suggested, and was finally determined, by the fact 
that the Greek language was then used in Palestine. 

There was also in use what may be readily de- 
scribed as the later Hebrew, (though pedantry, dark- 
ening what it seems to explain, calls what in Script- 
ure and by the Fathers was known as the Hebrew 
tongue, the Aramaean, or the Syro-Chaldaic.) In 
that Hebrew tongue our Lord cried from the cross, 



USE OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE. 97 

" Eloi ! Eloi ! lama sabachthani ? " That was the 
mother tongue of the Jews of Palestine. 

But, in consequence of a series of events that be- 
gan with Alexander's conquest of Asia, a dialect of 
the Greek was also known to the Jews of Palestine. 
How well it was known two facts may here suffi- 
ciently indicate. Acra, the name of one of the hills 
of Jerusalem, was Greek, and so was the Sanhedrim, 
the name of the parliament of the Jews. Outside of 
the small country of Palestine, the Hebrew tongue 
was not in common use among the Jews. Even 
Philo knew nothing of it. Still it was a strong 
measure to set aside our Lord's native tongue for a 
heathen language ; and yet on the final determina- 
tion of the disciples to do this largely depended the 
rapidity with which the life of the Lord was made 
known throughout the world ; for the Greek lan- 
guage was well-nigh universal throughout the Ro- 
man empire, and was known even beyond its eastern 
boundary. Near the Tigris, Seleucia, in those days, 
was a free Greek city, with a Senate of three hun- 
dred members, and with six hundred thousand 
inhabitants. 

Some hundred and fifty years before the Christian 
era, at Alexandria in Egypt, the translation was 
made of the Scriptures into Greek which is known 
as that of the LXX, or as the Septuagint. This 
was in use among the Jews of Palestine, as well as 
with those in Egypt, in Africa, in Syria, and else- 
where. The LXX did something toward fitting the 
Greek to utter those spiritual ideas that were the 

heritage of the true human race, and were in the 

1 



98 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

family of Noah, but which the Greeks, like other 
heathens, had forgotten ; and, also, to express spirit- 
ual ideas that had not been revealed to the Greeks, 
because of their apostasy. Even the facile and 
copious Greek language could not have embodied 
the truths the Witnesses declared, without*the help 
of the Septuagint. Its help was great, and yet there 
were some of their Master's words for which they 
had to frame Greek equivalents, such, perhaps, as 
the word in our Lord's prayer translated " daily 
bread." 

It was nice and difficult work to transfer the 
whole volume of the Lord's discourses, parables, and 
sayings, where with divine felicity the word fitted 
the thought, from the Hebrew tongue into the 
Greek, with their excellence unimpaired ; yet the 
disciples did this so well that no one dreams it could 
have been better done. We cannot help feeling so 
without being able to verify it ; and, as every good 
thing loses in translation, here might seem to have 
been a literary miracle, were it not that from their 
infancy the disciples had been so familiar with the 
Hebrew tongue, and with the Greek, that they 
spoke in both and thought in both ; and that what 
they did was rather a transferring from one language 
to the other than a translating. 

Language-learning is an important element in a 
liberal education ; and the readiness with which the 
Disciples thought in two languages — and languages 
as unlike as the oak and the palm — shows they had 
more of real intellectual training from their infancy 
than the pedants of their time conceded to them. 



USE OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE. 99 

And, in my judgment, there were never any persons 
but Palestinian Jews who could have so transferred 
the Gospel from the Hebrew tongue into the Greek. 
But if it be said that St. Luke was a Greek of An- 
tioch in Syria, it is to be remembered that docu- 
ments of Hebraic origin are incorporated into his 
Gospel as they came to him in Greek ; and that the 
basis of his Gospel was laid by St. Paul, and he 
spoke and thought both in Hebrew and in Greek ; 
for in the " uproar" in Jerusalem " when the Jews 
heard him speak in the Hebrew tongue they kept 
the more silence." Few of the foreign-born Jews 
could have done that; but, providentially, Saul had 
learned so to talk in his infancy, in his father's fam- 
ily in Tarsus ; for, doubtless, our Lord spoke from 
heaven "in the Hebrew tongue" to Saul, on his way 
to Damascus, because with Saul, as with Himself, it 
was his mother's tongue. 

As St. Matthew composed his Gospel in Hebrew, 
the decision of the disciples, as to which language 
they should use, was not made at once. But the 
need of the Hellenists in the city, and the com- 
mon use of Greek, must shortly have led to oral 
teaching in Greek and to a transferring backward 
and forward of the Gospel from one language to the 
other ; and as thus the Witnesses sometimes used 
one language and sometimes the other, the Greek 
expression of the Hebrew grew constantly more 
and more perfect ; and at last the reason for the 
sole use of the Greek language became so manifest, 
as the thoughts of the Apostles went forth more 
and more into the field of the world, that St. Mat- 



100 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

thew transferred his Gospel, which he had writteu 
in the Hebrew tongue, into Greek. 

The disciples had also to decide whether to quote 
the old Hebrew Scripture or the better known trans- 
lation : — and here I offer my first direct evidence 
of such an affinity between the oral Gospel and the 
written Gospel, that from the written Gospels we 
may be sure of some facts in the construction of the 
oral Gospel ; and also that, substantially, the oral 
Gospel of the Twelve is contained in the three 
earlier Gospels. The quotations from the Old 
Testament, that are common to St. Matthew, St. 
Mark, and St. Luke, are usually taken from the 
Sept-uagint, though some few of them agree in a 
peculiar rendering of the Hebrew. Where St. Mat- 
thew himself quotes the Old Testament — that is, 
where he cites texts that are cited by no other 
evangelist — he consults the Hebrew; hence, my 
conclusion is, that the disciples fixed upon and even 
determined the exact form of those proof-texts that 
are common to those three Gospels. 

The second Gospel is St. Peter's oral Gospel, 
written out by St. Mark, (as proved hereafter ;) and 
here I would only note that the discourses, and ref- 
erences to prophecy, that must have been a part of 
St. Peter's Gospel, were omitted by St. Mark be- 
cause they were in St. Matthew's Gospel ; and I call 
attention to this difference that my readers may 
contrast it with the agreement of those Gospels as 
to miracles. In the second, all the miracles, save 
two, are the same as in the first ; and the entire 
cycle of miracles common to the two earlier Gos- 



AGREEMENT AS TO MIRACLES. IOI 

pels also reappears in that of St. Luke, who, besides 
those, records only six others out of the multitudes 
left unrecorded. From these facts we must con- 
clude that the miracles common to those Gospels 
were fixed upon by the disciples for the oral Gos- 
pel. This is a satisfactory reason for their three- 
fold repetition ; and I would ask my readers whether 
they can think of any other satisfactory reason, or, 
rather, if they can think of any other reason for it 
at all? 

Our third evidence of the affinity of those Gos- 
pels with the oral Gospel is that the field of each is 
Galilee. St. Matthew thus limited his Gospel for a 
special reason hereafter given ; but when St. Mark's 
Gospel, and St. Luke's also, are limited to the min- 
istry in Galilee, then it becomes certain that the 
field of the oral Gospel was limited in the same way. 
My last special evidence is the fact that the order 
of events is the same in each of those Gospels : the 
Baptism, the Temptation, the Galilean ministry, dat- 
ing from the imprisonment of John, and the Week 
of the Passion. And here I would have my readers 
connect with this common order their common 
silence as to the ministry in Judea ; for it seems to 
me that, in view of these facts, there can be no 
doubt as to the order of events and the field of the 
oral Gospel. 

As we marshal all these facts, we find that the 
relation of these three Gospels to the oral Gospel 
is incontrovertible. Holding in reserve my ideas 
as to how each of the three earlier evangelists set 
about his work, and as to the aim of each as distinct 



102 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

from the purpose common to them all, I would 
here say, that they knew the oral Gospel by heart ; 
it was their storehouse of material, their authority, 
their guide. They took it for their pattern, they 
accepted its limitation, they borrowed from it words 
and phrases, they wrote it out in substance ; and so 
far from the oral Gospels of the twelve Witnesses 
being lost, it is reproduced in the Gospels of St. 
Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, in a more com- 
plete form than in any one of those twelve forms in 
which it was taught. 

The attempt to reconstruct the oral Gospel meets 
with difficulties, in the flexibility of that Gospel, and 
in the freedom with which those three Gospels were 
written, that cannot be overcome. All the many 
such attempts have so utterly failed that its recon- 
struction may be held to be impossible. Still, the 
field of the oral Gospel, its leading features, its 
speech, and its silence, its miracles, its citations of 
prophecy, and its discourses, can be known from 
those Gospels. There much of its narrative is given 
in much the same way and sometimes in much the 
same words. The like is still more true of the dis- 
courses and sayings of the Lord, where their verbal 
coincidences are more frequent than in their nar- 
rative ; and they often all retain some expressive 
phrase, such as, " shall not taste of death." 

The oral Gospel was the joint construction of the 
chosen Witnesses ; still it was not a stereotyped Gos- 
pel. There were thirteen forms of it, as there are 
three forms of the record of Matthew's call, three 
of the healing of the man sick with palsy, three of 



FREEDOM OF THE EVANGELISTS. 103 

the word on Mount Olivet. Amid those forms, and 
amid the changes each apostle made in suiting his 
teaching to the time and place, sometimes giving it 
more fully, sometimes more briefly, the minds of 
those Evangelists moved with freedom ; and, while 
they kept to the same field, the same order, and 
to much the same facts, they gave to each of their 
Gospels a character of its own. Authoritative as 
the oral Gospel was to them, obedient as they were 
to its example, yet each Evangelist wrote in his own 
way, as it seemed to him good. 

In the same spirit out of which grew the old 
legend of the translation of the Bible by the Sev- 
enty, one might imagine that had the disciples been 
shut up separately in a cell, they would all have writ- 
ten line for line and word for word, alike. But the 
Lord's promise to them was not fulfilled mechanic- 
ally, nor was it meant to be ; for his words point 
to human, as well as to divine testimony: a The 
Spirit which proceedeth from the Father, He shall 
testify of Me, and ye also shall bear witness because 
ye have been with Me from the beginning." Their 
witness to the life of the Lord is after the manner 
of human testimony; one remembers this, another 
that, and the same things are recalled more fully or 
more vividly by one than by another. Under the 
guidance of the Spirit, the Apostles selected from 
among the words and deeds of their Lord what 
were to go into their oral Gospel ; and so the three 
earlier Evangelists, under the same guidance, select- 
ed from the oral Gospels what should go into their 
written Gospel. In one form of the oral Gospel 



104 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

some things were more clear, some more pictorial, 
some more complete than in another ; and the Evan- 
gelists selected from and combined these, so as to 
give to their own Gospels the utmost perfection. 
They were under the common influence of the 
oral Gospel; and, as was natural with unpracticed 
writers, they caught up phrases that were of fre- 
quent recurrence, they repeated sentences and parts 
of sentences, but they did not draw upon it me- 
chanically.* Of course, the Apostle Matthew did 
not give the version of any of his brethren ; he 
gave his own ; St. Mark gave St. Peter's, St. Luke 
gave St. Paul's ; and yet what has been said of the 
evangelists would apply to those three apostles. 
The oral Gospel was incorporate in the souls of 
them all, and it spoke through them, while it yet 
left them free to speak. 

What Justin Martyr says about the Gospels will 
be found, when fairly and fully considered, exactly 
to agree with what has here been written. Writing 
for Jews and for heathen, he coined a name for the 

* While this volume was going through the press, I have looked 
over the long, elaborate treatise on the Gospels, in the edition of the 
"Encyclopaedia Brittanica," now publishing. By a minute dissec- 
tion of the narratives of the holy Evangelists it tries to prove that 
the Gospels are confused traditions ; but its hundreds of Greek cita- 
tions only show that the Evangelists wrote naturally. They are 
merely a pedantic and puerile enumeration of variations that were 
things of course. The chief significance of this last word of unbe- 
lief is in its showing that infidelity is now introduced into scientific 
books, as it was by the Encyclopaedists before the French Revolu- 
tion. Painstaking, as is usual with this sort of writing, this critique, 
as well as the many before that are like it, confirms my opinion, 
that ever to trust to this class of writers is to be deceived. 



USAGE OF JUSTIN MARTYR. 1 05 

Gospels that would describe them to those who 
knew something of Greek literature. He borrowed 
Xenophon's well-known title of his reminiscences 
of the life and sayings of his master, Socrates, and 
called them the Memorabilia (the Memoirs) of the 
Apostles. He uses this name a dozen times ; but 
he marks what their name is among Christians — 
they are " called Gospels." " They were written," 
he says, " by apostles and by those who accom- 
panied or followed with apostles;" that is, some 
by Apostles and some by companions of Apostles. 
He states that on every Sunday they were read. 
with the writings of the prophets. To Justin, then, 
our four Gospels were the witness of the Apostles ; 
and his opinion loses nothing because not given in 
any formal statement, but (though coming in re- 
peatedly) always in a casual, off-hand way. Hence 
we are sure that Christians then thought and spoke 
of the four Gospels as the witness of all the Apostles. 
And it were well to make this way of thinking and 
speaking of the Gospels (which from Justin's time 
to this has never been out of use in the Congrega- 
tion) again as common as it was in his day and 
generation. 

To the question — As there are but four Gospels, 
and as only two were written by Apostles, where is 
the witness of the ten, and where is that of St. Paul ? 
the answer, then, is this : St. Mark's Gospel is that 
of St. Peter, written down from his own lips. St. 
Luke's is that of the thirteenth apostle. And, from 
the circumstances in which the three earlier Gospels 
were written, from their selections, from their omis- 



106 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

sions, from the order in which they relate the life 
of the Lord, from their common choice of Galilee 
as their field, and their common avoidance of 
Judea, from some of their words and phrases, and, 
in short, from all the evidences that have been 
given of a connection between the unwritten Gos- 
pel of the Twelve and those written Gospels, it is 
certain that while the Gospels, of St. Matthew espe- 
cially, and, in some degree, those of St. Mark and 
St. Luke, are their own, there is a definite and true 
sense in which those Gospels are the joint-witness 
of the holy Apostles. St. John wrote the last Gos- 
pel in their name. And, God being pleased to make 
the Gospel perfect, in it the Blessed Mother bore 
her own witness to her Son and Lord. 



THE WRITING OUT OF THE GOSPEL. 10/ 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WRITING OUT OF THE GOSPEL. 

tT is hard to keep the two questions as to the 
origin and construction of the Gospels entirely- 
distinct ; the line here drawn between them is 
a line of convenience rather than of strict division ; 
and my first proposition as to their construction 
belongs to both. 

That St. Matthew and St. John, and that only 
those two of the twelve Witnesses, wrote out the 
Gospel, is sufficient evidence that they were selected 
by their brethren for that office. There is no record 
of such a choice ; but there are some considera- 
tions that may partially explain the lack of such 
evidence. The two earlier Evangelists close their 
Gospels with the Resurrection. St. Luke continues 
the sacred history ; he describes the day of Pente- 
cost and some events that took place afterward in 
Jerusalem ; but, as already noted, St. Paul was not 
then numbered among the disciples. Then came 
the long silence before described. And on the 
mind and memory of the early Christian genera- 
tions the selection of Matthew and John as Evan- 
gelists may have made less impression, because 
the questions about the construction of the Gos- 
pels that unbelief would raise in future ages could 



108 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

not be foreknown ; because, in virtue of their office, 
the Apostles Matthew and John were empowered 
to write out the Gospel ; because, like all Christians, 
they thought more of the divine in the Gospels 
than of the human ; and because they held the four 
Gospels to be the joint testimony of all the chosen 
Witnesses. 

Whether these things do or do not account for it, 
let it be frankly acknowledged that there is no record 
of the Disciples having given such counsel to Mat- 
thew and John ; and yet there is a line of thought 
that makes this as certain to my mind as if it were 
well known in history. There are many unrecorded 
things concerning the Disciples that are as certain 
as if they were facts of record, merely because the 
Disciples were men. That they were born, or that 
they slept at night and waked with the morning, 
though not facts of record, are so certain that no 
record could make them more so ; and their coun- 
seling with one another about the writing out of 
the Gospel is equally certain, though there be no 
record of it. For the absence of any record of this 
we may, or we may not, be able to account ; but it 
should be the fixed rule of our. thinking never to 
doubt what we do know because of what we do not 
know. In all truth there is the unknown as well as 
the known. In the Hebrew Scripture darkness is 
one of the symbols of God. His holiest servants 
knew in part and prophesied but in part. And as 
the element light went forth in the beginning out 
of the darkness, so the truth in nature, in history, 
in Scripture, ever goes forth out of darkness. 



NUMBER OF WRITTEN GOSPELS. IO9 

I do not think that the Disciples took action upon 
the writing out of the Gospel with any great for- 
mality, great as were its consequences. I come to 
this conclusion not merely because ecclesiastical 
ceremonials came in afterward ; not merely because 
the idea that the Apostles held what might be called 
a Council, by way of needlessly clothing their action 
with dignity, carries a later term back to those 
primitive days; but simply because there could 
have been no debate concerning the writing out of 
the Gospel. The Disciples were earnest men, not 
men of words or forms, and could not have dis- 
cussed with formality and at length what was a 
thing of course. That the Gospel should be writ- 
ten out was no more the thought of one than of 
another ; for one to name it was for them all to say 
it must be done. 

When the Disciples came to pass upon the num- 
ber of the written Gospels, doubtless they at once 
dismissed the extravagance of twelve. They may 
have paused at the sacred number seven, and again 
at the perfect number four ; but here conjecture is 
needless, for we know they fixed upon two, for only 
two of them wrote out the Gospel. This number 
seems too small — perhaps because of our four Gos- 
pels — but the disciples were not book-making men. 
They could all teach, for that was telling out of 
their own hearts about Him of whom they were 
always thinking. It was telling of what he said 
and what he did, how he laid down his life, how he 
took it again ; but they had never tried to write a 
book. And yet, while teaching, each was uncon- 



I TO THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

sciously helping on the work that he felt he could 
not do. For the molten form of the written Gos- 
pel was the oral Gospel — the written Gospel is the 
crystallization of the oral Gospels. 

The Disciples had next to choose their two 
writers, and it is natural to think that they all 
(save the two most concerned) at once fixed upon 
their Chief, and upon the Disciple whom Jesus loved, 
and to whom he had intrusted the care of his 
Mother. Besides this suggestive and persuasive rea- 
son there was still another why they selected John. 
There were two fields of our Lord's ministry — a 
fact that may have had something to do with de- 
termining the number of the Gospels. John had a 
house in Jerusalem. He was more familiar with 
the city than those other " men of Galilee." In all 
the visits of Jesus to Jerusalem, save his last, there 
are signs of caution ; and it is likely that on some 
of them he took John only with him. On his first 
visit there could have been with him only four of 
the Disciples besides John. The whole of the Ju- 
dean ministry was not, then, personally known to 
all the Twelve ; possibly the whole of it was known 
to John, and to him only ; indeed, this is a fair 
conclusion, because the Judean ministry forms no 
part of their oral Gospel, while it forms almost the 
whole of the Gospel of St. John. 

Quick, impetuous natures often distrust them- 
selves ; and some such feeling may have hindered 
St. Peter from yielding to the will of his brethren ; 
and he may have discovered a great fitness in Mat- 
thew for the work to be done ; for, doubtless, with 



CHOICE OF ST. MATTHEW. Ill 

the assent of all, the Chief Apostle named Matthew 
as, next to John, the one best fitted to write out 
the Gospel. 

Matthew was not of the inner circle of three into 
which, on the Mount of Olives, came Andrew, who, 
with John, was the first to seek Jesus, and who 
brought to Him his brother Simon. Matthew's 
name comes into the second group of the disciples. 
St. Luke puts it third in that class ; he himself puts 
it fourth and last. After his discipleship Levi, the 
son of Alpheus, was known by the name of Mat- 
thew — " the gift of God." The name may have 
been given by the Lord. I cannot think he took 
it himself when I look at his list of the disciples, 
for, in that roll of honor, he styles himself " Mat- 
thew the publican." Levi was one of the tax-gath- 
erers of Herod of Galilee. As he was sitting in 
Oriental fashion at the receipt of customs — a 
strange place for such a call — he heard Jesus say- 
ing, " Follow me." Some traits of Levi's character, 
that I seem to see in the portrait he unconsciously 
drew of himself in his Gospel, then come out. 
Levi, the Silent, answered in deeds, not in words. 
With a merchant-like quickness of decision, he rose, 
left all, and followed Jesus. 

After he became a disciple he made a feast for 
the Master. Nothing else that he did is mentioned 
in the Gospels ; and there he says not a word. It 
has been often repeated that his office in the cus- 
toms fitted him for the office of an Evangelist, but I 
fail to see the relation between collecting taxes and 
writing a Gospel. By choosing him to write for 



112 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

them his brethren show that, in spite of his silence, 
they knew he was fitted for that work ; and his Gos- 
pel vindicates their choice. The men who make 
history are not usually the men who write it ; yet 
some men of action have written better than rhetori- 
cians; and, though not a man of letters and not a 
man of words, yet, if ever any one was capable of 
writing well, that one was Levi, the son of Alpheus, 
known to us as Matthew — " the gift of God." 

Let me clear up what has been said of the action 
of the twelve Apostles in having the Gospel properly 
written out in their name, by supposing that had 
their last survivor but one been interrogated con- 
cerning their course, the aged man might thus have 
replied : 

" I remember. I was not to do it. Writing 
books was not my gift, nor was it Brother Peter's. 
We were men of action. I could tell the story, for 
I knew it by heart, and I shall tell it till I die ; but 
I could not write it. We all felt timid about writ- 
ing a book ; but it had to be done. There was no 
doubt of that. We all thought of Peter and John : 
some thought of Andrew, some of others. The 
matter was not much talked about. Somehow it 
came to be understood among us that Matthew 
and John were to do it. Matthew did his work a 
long while ago. The story got round among the 
brethren that John would never die. They did not 
get that quite right, like some other things ; but, 
from something the Master did say, we knew that 
John would tarry long. He has outlived all but 
me. We live till our work is done." 



LIMITATIONS OF THE GOSPELS. 113 



CHAPTER VII. 

LIMITATIONS OF THE GOSPELS. 

N trying to look into the construction of the 
Gospels, one of the first things to be done is 
to compare those of the two Apostles. On 
laying them side by side it is seen at once that St. 
Matthew and St. John made a division of the field 
of our Lord's ministry — St. Matthew choosing Gal- 
ilee, and St. John, Judea. St. Matthew's course 
proves this ; for though St. John might have taken 
the Judean field because the Evangelists before him 
had not entered it, yet why did not St. Matthew 
occupy that field, or some part of it ? The course 
of St. John also is evidence of this division ; for 
much that the Lord did in Galilee was left unre- 
corded, and yet thrice only does St. John garner 
up any of the sheaves that his colleague had left in 
that harvest field. St. Matthew and St. John fol- 
low each his own path till Calvary comes in sight ; 
then their paths come together, for the Gospel is 
the story of the Cross. The last week in the life of 
their Lord was common to them both ; and yet, as 
will be seen hereafter, even then, as to the recital of 
some things, there was an understanding between 
them. 

In St. Matthew's avoidance of the Ministry in 
8 



114 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Judea there is the soberness of history, not the 
flightiness of legendary lore ; and, though the like 
course of St. Mark and St. Luke complicates mat- 
ters, yet even if that could not be explained, (as it 
can be,) still St. Matthew could not have left such a 
blank had he not been well assured that it would be 
filled up. An agreement between him and some one 
else is the only rationally conceivable human reason 
for his course, still leaving for it a higher reason in 
the determinate wisdom of God. And the strength 
of this argument is re-enforced to demonstration 
when there is seen in St. John's Gospel that con- 
cert of action which is anticipated in St. Matthew's 
Gospel. 

I find this confirmed, rather than otherwise, by 
the tradition which, in the third century, Eusebius 
recites. He says that the elders of the congrega- 
tion at Ephesus brought to the last Apostle, then 
very old, the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and 
St. Luke, and that he gave them his sanction. Eu- 
sebius further states that St. John said there were 
yet some things to be written, and the elders be- 
sought him to write them. All this may be true ; 
for, though the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke 
must long before have received the sanction of some 
of the apostles, it was natural that this should be 
asked for again for the last time ; and, though the 
Gospel of the Apostle needed no sanction, that this 
should be brought with the others. But we find the 
strong motive and deepest reason for this interview 
in the request of the elders. They knew of St. 
John's purpose to write, and feared he was putting it 



ST. JOHN'S LONG TARRYING. 1 1 5 

off too long. Their wish may have seemed to him 
a providential intimation. Their hearts were glad- 
dened by his promise, and — harmless self-congratu- 
lation of blameless men- — it seemed to them at last 
that St. John wrote his Gospel at their request ! 
He may, as the tradition states, have said that he 
would add something to what the other evangelists 
had said, and he may have written some things in 
part because they had not ; just as he wrote noth- 
ing about the Temptation or the Transfiguration be- 
cause they had left him nothing to write ; but what 
he had in mind was that Gospel which had been the 
thought of his whole life long. 

St. John's long tarrying seems strange ! It con- 
tradicts the saying of the heathen, " Whom the 
gods love die young." And that his Master would 
have called his " beloved disciple " sooner than the 
rest is so natural a thought, that it may have led the 
old man, left alone, and, it might almost seem to 
others, forgotten, to repeat so often, in the confiding 
way of the aged, that he was the one whom Jesus 
loved. And yet how could his Master have better 
shown his love for the favorite disciple than by leav- 
ing him to complete and perfect the work of his 
brethren ? 

With the oral Gospel, with the Gospel written 
out by St. Matthew, by St. Mark, by St. Luke, and 
read in all the Christian assemblies, the need for St. 
John to make haste in his great work lay in the 
uncertainty of human life; but St. John's life was 
not uncertain. He knew that he should outlive all 
his brethren. He rested in the assurance that he 



Il6 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

might meditate so long. In the persecution of 
Nero, in the exile in Patmos, what a comfort it was 
to know that death could not take him away in the 
midst of his years, with his work unfinished ! What 
his Master said of his long tarrying almost seems 
casual and causeless, until this sufficient reason 
appears, that justifies St. John's taking the long 
time for meditation which he felt he needed, be- 
tween the writing of his colleague's Gospel and his 
own. And in his last chapter St, John may have 
recorded those words of the Lord as much to ex- 
plain his seeming slowness as for any other cause. 

St. John ever had it in his heart to write that 
Gospel, and it was ever in his thoughts. His whole 
life went into it, the glow of youthful feeling, the 
strength of manhood, the wisdom of age. All that 
he had seen and felt and known of the glory of the 
only-begotten of the Father comes up before him 
as he dictates to his scribe. He speaks the last 
words that will ever come from that band of broth- 
ers whom the Lord chose to be Witnesses to Him- 
self! How strong the impulse to select his facts 
from all the wonders of his memory! And how 
well he kept his compact with his dead comrade ! 

For the first time, perhaps, in all the centuries 
since it was made, let us now inquire for the reasons 
of the agreement between St. Matthew and St. 
John in Jerusalem, so faithfully kept long after Je- 
rusalem was " trodden down," in a city so far away, 
in a world so changed. And if we are able to make 
out the reasons why St. Matthew and St. John de- 
cided that the earliest written Gospel should be 



DIVISION OF THE FIELD. 117 

limited to the Galilean Ministry, it may be that, at 
the same time, we shall learn the reasons for the 
like limitation of the oral Gospel and of the Gospels 
of St. Mark and St. Luke. 

All the Gospels are arguments to prove that Jesus 
is the Christ, through whom is salvation ; St. Mat- 
thew and St. John had no idea that to make this 
truth clear and certain all that was said and done 
by the Lord must be written out ; yet, when they 
conferred together, they may have thought it well, 
jointly, to draw a complete outline of His Ministry. 
It is also reasonable to suppose that they would 
avoid selecting the same facts. 

They reached both of these ends by dividing be- 
tween them the field of the Ministry in a geograph- 
ical way. During the Roman age in Palestine (as 
every one knows) Judea was the southern county 
of the Holy Land, Galilee the northern county, and 
between them was the alien and hostile county of 
Samaria. The Ministry in Galilee was thus geo- 
graphically separated from the Ministry in Judea : 
and this may very naturally have suggested the di- 
vision that St. Matthew and St. John made of their 
field of labor. Yet the area of Palestine was small, 
the Romans kept the peace, Jerusalem was the re- 
ligious capital of all its counties but Samaria, and 
the Jewish communities were every-where alike ; 
hence the topographical reason is not fully sufficient 
to account for that division. But what force it had 
was strengthened by the feeling of the Jews for Ju- 
dea — a peculiar feeling that disclosed itself to me 
while musing on the story of Petronius in the 



Il8 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

graphic volumes of Josephus, those unexhausted 
treasure-mines of the geography and history of the 
Holy Land. 

Judea is strictly a name for but one canton of 
the land of Israel. Geographically it is isolated. It 
is the water-shed of torrents that, to the east, rush 
down steep and barren ravines into the dissevering 
chasm of the Dead Sea, and, to the west, fertilize 
the sandy Philistine plain along the Great Sea — a 
plain that was never really Jewish. To the south 
it reached to the Desert, and on its southern con- 
fines lived those wild Idumean Jews despised and 
feared by the citizens of Jerusalem. On the north 
Judea joined the land of the Samaritans, with whom 
" the Jews had no dealings." 

In the Roman Age in Palestine there were other 
than geographical reasons for the isolation of Judea. 
The Jews were estranged from what had once been 
the land of Israel. Jerusalem was still the center 
of the Jewish race, but had ceased to be the center 
of Palestine, and it was then the religious gathering 
place of a minority of its inhabitants. Judea then 
had little more to do with the Jews in Palestine, 
" outside of its own bounds," than with the Jews in 
Syria, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in the East and in 
the Far-East, who made the Pilgrimage once in their 
lives, and sent their yearly offerings to the Temple. 
The Judeans then felt that Judea was the Holy 
Land, and this feeling was shared by all the Jews. 

The Jews did not then speak of Palestine, outside 
of Judea, as their country. They did not feel out- 
raged by its heathen worship. Judaism, couched 



FEELING OF THE JEWS FOR JUDEA. 119 

among the Judean hills like a lion driven to its lair, 
resigned the rest of the land to its enemies. The 
Judeans and all the Jews looked upon idolatry 
within what had been the other eleven cantons of 
Israel much as they looked upon the idolatry of 
Babylonia or of Egypt. This comes out in these 
words of Josephus, written at Rome, concerning the 
heathen temples erected by Herod : " They were 
built, not in Judea indeed, for that would not have 
been borne, but in the country out of our bounds." 

A Roman general came to Ptolemais, marching 
against Petra. His shortest road was through Ju- 
dea ; but its chief men came and besought him not 
to march through their country, because images 
that were worshiped were carried on the standards 
of the legions. The general went up to Jerusalem, 
looked into the matter, and changed the route of 
his army. Pilate brought the standards into the 
Holy City " in the night, Avithout the knowledge 
of the people." Then multitudes went to him at 
Caesarea, and " interceded with him many days." 
Wearied with their importunities, Pilate surrounded 
them with soldiers, and threatened them with death 
if they did not go home. Their reply was, that 
they would willingly die rather than their law 
should be transgressed ; and Pilate, at last, ordered 
the ensigns to be withdrawn from the Holy City. 

A decree went forth from the Emperor Caligula 
that his own statue should be set up and worshiped 
in the Temple. Pretonius, the proconsul of Syria, 
saw the danger of carrying out this decree, and he 
set about it with the blended patience and energy 



120 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

of the Roman policy. Besides his own two legions, 
he got together as many auxiliary troops as he 
could. He came with a great army to Ptolemais, 
and wintered there. He thus delayed, thinking that 
the Jews, on learning how complete his preparations 
were, and having time to become familiar with the 
hateful idea, would be less likely to resist. Thou- 
sands flocked to Ptolemais, praying Petronius to 
give up his design, and calling on him to slay them 
first, for they could not suffer him to set up the 
image while they w T ere alive. Seeing all this, Pe- 
tronius rode across the country from Ptolemais to 
Tiberias, the better to judge of the temper of the 
people. Thousands beset him at Tiberias also, ami 
with them came some of the princes of the He- 
rodian house. The general was so moved by the 
persuasion of the princes and the distress of the 
people, that he took a course that was worthy of 
the best days of Rome. At the risk of his own life 
he suspended the execution of the decree till he 
could hear from Caligula, " thinking it fit for virtu- 
ous persons to die for the sake of such vast multi- 
tudes of men/' At Rome the influence of Herod 
Agrippa, interposed with great tact, recalled the 
decree ; but the imperial madman was so enraged 
with the proconsul that he dispatched an order 
that he should be put to death. Then what the 
Hebrews called " the finger of God " was seen. 
Another galley, still more swiftly pressing on to 
Syria with the news that the Emperor Caligula was 
slain, passed, on the sea, the galley that carried the 
death-warrant, and the life of Petronius was saved ! 



FEELING OF THE JEWS FOR JUDEA. 121 

These facts prove that, in the Roman age, the 
passionate love of the Jews for the land of Israel 
found its only resting-place in Judea. The glory 
of Jerusalem still crowned its hills. Judea was the 
last stronghold of their religion. As some old family 
that has parted, piece by piece, with its land, till 
the few remaining acres are doubly sacred, is mad- 
dened at the thought of strangers coming to take 
the old homestead, so the Jews felt toward Judea. 
The rest of the land was no longer sacred. The 
gods of the heathen had their accursed temples in 
Joppa, in Ptolemais, at the foot of Mount Carmel, 
at the springs of the sacred Jordan, in Samaria, over 
the river, and along the plain by the sea. When 
the pilgrim-Jew, bound for Palestine, drew nigh to 
the harbor of Csesarea, he turned away his angry 
eyes from the heathen temple set up there by King 
Herod, seen far over the sea. Every-where in the 
land of Israel, " outside of the bounds" of Judea, 
there had come in the "abominable" idolatry of the 
nations. The Jews had learned how to tolerate 
that ; but they would have died to save holy Judea 
— all that was left them unprofaned of the Holy 
Land — from such pollution. 

The Gospels have to do almost wholly with Jews, 
who were every-where one and the same people ; 
and the breadth and sharpness of the difference be- 
tween Judea and the rest of what had once been the 
land of Israel could not fully appear in the Gospels, 
because the Son of Abraham was sent to the lost 
sheep of the house of Israel. He passed by half- 
heathen Tiberias ; and he may never have seen 



122' THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Gadara,* only seven miles southward from the lake, 
that fine Greek city, whose temples, theaters, and 
rock-hewn tombs still witness to its greatness. In 
the Gospels little is seen of the idol-carving, festive 
Greeks, of the sea-faring Phoenicians, of the Syrians, 
of the clans of the Lebanon, and of the restless 
Arabs, who all made Galilee of the Gentiles (that is, 
of the nations — the name of its northern district, to 
which Capernaum belonged, yet a name that fitted 
the whole of Galilee) so unlike Judea. A mirror 
reflects what is before it ; the mirror of the Gospel 
reflects the Jewish life in Galilee ; and the Jewish 
life, with its families and feasts, its synagogues and 
Sabbaths, like the Jewish features, was the same in 
Galilee as in Judea. 

Go where he might, the course of the Messiah 
was ever tending toward Jerusalem, for there only 
could be offered the sacrifice for the sin of the 
world. The Cross was the goal of his desire. " I 
have," He said, " a baptism to be baptized with, 
and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." 
The sameness of the ways and manners of the Jews 
among whom he lived, and his singleness of aim, 
gave such oneness to the whole field of his Ministry 
that it requires a mental effort to apprehend how 
different was the feeling of St. Matthew, St. John, 

* This city, one of several Greek cities east of the river, was rebuilt 
by Pompey the Great to please his freedman, Demetrius, who was born 
there ; the same who, with one old soldier, paid the last honors to his 
dead body. In " the country of the Gadarenes," that is, in the territory 
of the city on the east of the lake, and near the village of Gergesa, from 
which Matthew, to whom the lake-region was minutely known, calls 
it " the country of the Gergesenes," our Lord healed the demoniacs. 



THE DIVISION OF THE FIELD. 1 23 

and the rest of the disciples toward Galilee, though 
all save one were Galileans, from what it was toward 
Judea, and how widely separated in their thoughts 
was their Lord's life in Galilee from his life in Judea. 

The division that St. Matthew and St. John made 
of the field of the ministry is farther explained by 
the reason already given why St. John was selected 
by the disciples as one of their two Evangelists — his 
knowledge of the things done in Judea and Jerusa- 
lem. This being greater than that of his colleague, 
Judea naturally fell to John, when geographical and 
other reasons led them to divide the field. 

There remains a stronger reason for this division. 
In the only recorded hour of his youth in Jerusalem 
how unlike Jesus was from what he had been in the 
home in Nazareth ! And as his spirit then so stirred 
within him and his words of wisdom were so beyond 
the thirteenth of his human years, how must his 
soul have been moved, what truth he must have re- 
vealed when he was there in his manhood ! Surely 
it was fitting and natural that in his Father's house 
he should make known more of the mystery of the 
Father and the Son, and in Jerusalem reveal his 
deepest truths more than in Galilee. 

Morally and mentally, the citizens of Jerusalem 
and the men of Galilee were somewhat unlike. In 
Galilee all the people but the hateful Nazarenes 
heard Jesus patiently. In Jerusalem the Messiah 
was confronted by adversaries whose trained reason- 
ing powers had been sharpened by listening to, and 
debating with, subtle disputants, who came from 
the ends of the earth. Those hostile, haughty, in- 



124 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

telligent watchers of every look and word sought 
by sudden interruptions, by crafty interrogations, 
to entangle him in his speech ; and the utterance 
of thoughts so broken in upon was less consecutive 
than in Galilee. 

St. Matthew, the only Evangelist who calls Jeru- 
salem the Holy City, must have been sensitive to all 
the influences of Jerusalem. He could appreciate 
the difference between our Lord's utterances to 
Jews and to Galileans. He could discern in John 
that receptive, assimilative, piercing quality of mind 
and heart, then undeveloped, that is now so clearly 
seen in his Gospel. St. Matthew was the very man 
to mark in St. John the germ of that aptness to 
apprehend the meaning of such words as our Lord 
said in Jerusalem, which gave to St. John his su- 
preme place among the holy Evangelists. I hold it 
good evidence of this, that St. Matthew left to St. 
John the recital of that discourse in the synagogue 
in Capernaum, which is so like those in Jerusalem. 
I think that his colleague, understanding the reason 
of this omission, made that discourse a part of his 
Gospel, though it was delivered in Galilee ; for the 
concert of action between them was intelligent, not 
mechanical. 

The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John com- 
plement each other. Not finding the Judean Min- 
istry in St. Matthew's Gospel, we look for it in that 
of St. John, and there we find it. Not finding the 
Galilean ministry in St. John, we look for it in St. 
Matthew, and there we find it. The two Gospels 
are the halves of a whole. 



LIMITATION OF THE ORAL GOSPEL. 1 25 

The reasons, then, for that division of their field 
by the two apostolic Evangelists (which on compar- 
ing their Gospels is so plain) were John's peculiar 
qualities, his knowledge of the ministry in Judea 
and Jerusalem, the feeling that Judea was a world 
by itself, and the geographical separation of Galilee 
from Judea. But in the oral Gospel, and in the 
second and third Gospels, there is the same limita- 
tion that there is in St. Matthew's to the land of 
Galilee ; and the compact, agreement, or under- 
standing that has so far availed seems to avail no 
more. Thrice we again face the same problem : 
but if solved in the case of the oral Gospel, it is 
solved for all. For, doubtless, the similar limita- 
tion of the second and third Gospels was dependent 
upon the limitation of the oral Gospel and of St. 
Matthew's Apostolic Gospel; and, in fact, the second 
Gospel was one of the oral Gospels. The real dif- 
ficulty lies farther back. It is the limitation of the 
oral Gospel that has to be cleared up. 

The starting-point here is the fact that it was the 
purpose of a Gospel to prove that Jesus was the 
Christ ; for such being the end and aim of a Gos- 
pel, it could be reached although the Judean min- 
istry were passed over. In the main, this is the 
explanation of the limitation of the oral Gospel to 
the Galilean ministry ; and this, together with the 
disciples' selection of Matthew and John to write 
out the Gospels, and their knowing (as they must 
have known) the understanding between them, ex- 
plains why the disciples, in their oral Gospel, ignored 
the Judean ministry. The two last facts are essen- 



126 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

tial to the explanation. Without them the limita- 
tion cannot fully be accounted for, and that, by their 
help, it can be explained, is strong evidence of the 
selection and of the agreement. For it is very 
doubtful whether any thing short of an express rev- 
elation would have fully justified their passing over 
those events in Judea unless they could have said 
among themselves : " John knows all about those 
things. Of many of them some of us know nothing. 
He knows the whole, and, in due time, will write 
this out in our name. Let us give unity to our 
witness by framing the oral Gospel from that one 
circle of events whose facts are known to us all." 

All else that has been said of the reasons for the 
course of the two Evangelists applies to that of the 
Disciples ; for, as well as their Evangelists, they felt 
the difference between the two fields of the minis- 
try. They also felt that their Master's teaching was, 
at times, of a kind the recording of which suited 
the genius of John better than of any other. In 
their case, as in that of St. Matthew, I find evi- 
dence of this in their not giving the discourse in 
Capernaum ; and still stronger evidence in another 
fact. Of the week of the Passion their recital was 
so minute as to be a contrast to their broad de- 
lineation of the months and years that preceded 
it; yet the oral Gospel, like that of St. Matthew, 
passed over the discourse on the night of the 
Last Supper. I think I can understand the feeling 
that led to that silence. Of those four disciples, 
who with wonder listened as they sat on Mount 
Olivet, " over against the Temple," three tried to 



LIMITATION OF THE ORAL GOSPEL. 12? 

repeat what they most deeply felt and could best 
remember of that prophetic word ; but each one of 
the disciples felt within himself, and may have said, 
each to the other, " We must all leave the repeat- 
ing of the farewell of our dying Lord to John, and 
may the Lord help him to say those solemn and 
tender words as he said them to us ! " — a prayer that 
was granted. 

With one other fact joined to these, the sought- 
for explanation becomes complete. In the oral 
Gospels (judging from that of St. Peter) there was 
greater unity and directness than in the Gospels of 
St. Matthew and St. Luke, whose structure was 
more complicate. But in all those Gospels the 
life of the Lord was ever tending to the city that 
murdered the prophets, where it ended. It might 
have broken in upon their unity, had those Gospels 
included the early sojourn of the Lord in Jerusa- 
lem and Judea ; for the character of his ministry up 
to the time of the imprisonment of John the Bap- 
tist * (though it cannot be called private) may be 
said to have been of a tentative kind. It was then 
the purpose of Jesus to test the fitness of the Jews 
to receive his Gospel, as compared with the Gali- 
leans among whom he had lived. The continuing 
of the Herald's proclamation after the Baptism and 
up to the time of his imprisonment, was probably 
meant to give time for this ; and certainly it shows 
the King had not yet come. 

The Herald never went into Jerusalem, and the 

* See the last Gospel to verse 24 of chap. iii. The fullness of the 
ministry dates from verse 43 of chap. iv. 



128 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

King went there with caution until his last visit, 
whose open boldness was in contrast with his other 
visits — for his time had come. The King's minis- 
try began in the North. As had been foretold, the 
light shone out " in the land of Zebulon and Naph- 
tali, in Galilee of the Gentiles," and not in the 
land of Judah. Therefore it would seem that the 
oral teaching of the disciples should have begun 
there ; for, in thinking of this, we are to keep in 
mind that it was no more indispensable to a Gospel 
to record what our Lord said and did in that earlier 
period in Jerusalem than to record what He said and 
did while tarrying among the Samaritans. It was 
like those earnest men, in their oral teaching, to 
pass over the period of preparation for the full- 
ness of the Ministry : and our conclusion is, that, 
like their Evangelist St. Matthew, they thought it 
best to leave all that was to be said of the early 
Judean ministry to St. John. 

In this respect, the construction of the oral and 
of the written Gospels can be explained through 
the truth that it was the end and aim of a Gospel 
to reveal the life of the Saviour, so as to give the 
meaning of his sacrificial Death and to prove his glo- 
rious Resurrection ; and, therefore, that a recital of 
his life in Galilee, of his Passion and Resurrection, 
might suffice for a Gospel. This being so, the ex- 
planation and defense of the construction of the 
oral and of the written Gospels, at this point, is a 
valid one. And yet the end and aim of a Gospel 
here needs to be presented more explicitly, because 
it has become so common to hold that it was the 



CHRIST JESUS THE SAVIOUR. 1 29 

end and aim of a Gospel to make known Christ Je- 
sus as our teacher and example. This puts one truth 
into the place where another truth belongs. A 
truth out of its own place and in the place of an- 
other truth, has somewhat the effect of an untruth ; 
and here this makes the construction of the Gospels 
inexplicable. For, surely, if such had been the end 
and aim of a Gospel, then the disciples and the 
Evangelists should have labored to reproduce every 
word that our Lord uttered, and to tell every thing 
that he did. 

But, as there is danger here of being misunder- 
stood, let me say, it is written that Christ Jesus is 
our teacher and our example. He is our example, 
for he ever gave up his own will to the will of the 
Father. He is our teacher through the truth that 
ever fell from his lips. And I need tell none of the 
few who read my books that I have ever dwelt upon 
the truth, that the Eternal Word who was made 
flesh and dwelt among us enlighteneth every man 
that cometh into the world, that he hath ever taught 
and ever teaches in the things that he made, in the 
course of all events, in the ordering of each life, and 
in his Holy Scriptures. 

It was one of the many aims of the Holy Script- 
ures to reveal Christ Jesus as teacher and example, 
but so direct and single was the purpose of his in- 
spired Evangelists to reveal Christ as the Redeemer, 
that this was held by them in strict subordination 
to that higher purpose, even that manifestation of 
his Atonement through which, in the highest possi- 
ble degree, Christ became teacher and example. In 



130 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

this the Gospels are in harmony with the time and 
with the facts in the Saviour's Ministry ; for its 
time was too short for teaching to have been a pre- 
eminent purpose, and its success was too small. 
He wrought as a teacher in showing to the children 
of Israel, by word and deed, that he was the Mes- 
siah ; but he convinced of this only his disciples 
and a few others. For a time the people heard him 
gladly, yet the immediate effect of the Sermon on the 
Mount was not as great as that of the sermon St. Pe- 
ter preached after the life and death of Christ were 
interpreted by the Holy Ghost. 

Those who say that all that there is in the golden 
rule and in the Lord's prayer had been uttered be- 
fore by sages and saints go rather beyond the truth, 
making the partial equal to the complete ; yet our 
Lord did say that his own definition of duty, " love 
to God and love to man," was the sum of the Law 
and the Prophets. And when the Lord promised 
that the Holy Ghost should guide to all truth, he dis- 
claimed the office of teacher — that is, of the Great 
Teacher — so often erroneously thought to have been 
pre-eminently his office during his life on earth. 

The eternal Word did not take upon himself the 
form of man, to school-master the human race. In 
the Scriptures none of the other ends of his coming 
are exalted to an equality with the Atonement. The 
Epistle to the Hebrews proves from the Law and 
the Prophets what the Gospels prove from his life 
on earth, that He, who was in the beginning with 
God, and who was God, came to manifest the divine 
mercy through his death. He himself said that the 



CHRIST THE REDEEMER. 131 

other signs that he was the Christ were as nothing 
in comparison with the sign of the Prophet Jonah ; 
that is, the sign of his own death and resurrec- 
tion. 

The inexorable duties of to-day leave no surplus 
virtue with which to make up for the sins of yester- 
day ; and a man who cannot atone for his own sins 
cannot for the sins of others. The sinless Son of 
Man and Son of God could do this, and he did this. 
In his Atonement is the reason for his Incarnation ; 
and, through the logic inhering in the evolvement 
of thought from thought, they who deny the atone- 
ment come at last to deny the incarnation. Thus 
they degrade the Christ from the place he holds 
among Christians to the place of human teachers 
and examples. They claim a high place for some of 
these, for Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, 
Mohammed — a place that may be allowed in spite of 
their sins and errors; but they were men. The dif- 
ference in gentleness, in wisdom, or in force of will 
between them and other men was but a difference in 
degree. They were great and they did much ; but it 
was insignificant compared with what was done for 
the human race by those forgotten benefactors who 
kindled the first fire, forged the first bar of iron, 
struck the first note of music, or framed the oldest 
alphabet. What those teachers knew of truth, be- 
yond others of their time, was of less moment than 
the truth that all men have ever known in common : 
for all have ever known that it is appointed unto all 
men once to die, and after death the judgment ; 
and what did Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Bud- 



132 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

dha, Mohammed, teach that equaled these common 
truths ? The Word, who enlighteneth every man, 
taught them all the truth they knew. Whatever 
they wrought of righteousness they wrought through 
the Spirit of Christ ; and, if their sins and errors 
have been forgiven, and they have attained unto 
everlasting life, it is because Christ the Saviour died 
for sinners. 

The Seed of the woman bruised the head of the 
serpent. On the divine Son of Mary the iniquity 
of us all was laid. The angel said to St. Joseph 
that the child of the holy Virgin would save his 
people from their sins. That was his work ! Noth- 
ing else that he did is to be named with it — not 
even when he called for the heavens and the earth 
and they came. On the cross he " finished " the 
revelation of God, not only for those of woman 
born, but for all the intelligent creatures that now 
are, or shall hereafter be, in all the worlds of the one 
indivisible universe he made. Then was " finished" 
that revelation of God through which He became 
forever " the brightness of the Father's glory, and 
the express image of His person," to angels as to 
men. That nothing is said in the creed of Christ's 
teachings, nothing of his miracles, nothing of his 
example, was a thing ordained. There the Incarna- 
tion and the Atonement are strikingly definite in 
their human relations, yet there nothing is suffered 
to share our thoughts with the incarnation and the 
atonement : " He was born of the Virgin Mary, 
crucified under Pontius Pilate." 



CHRIST THE REDEEMER. 1 33 

Thus I have proved what I said in the Introduc- 
tion, that some of the higher truths of our holy 
religion are confirmed by the study of the Construc- 
tion of the Gospels. For, by means of the truth 
that Christ died to atone for the sin of the world, 
which is revealed by the prophets, and is the burden 
of the Epistles, the construction of the Gospels can 
be explained and defended. In the light of the 
great central truth — the sacrificial death of Christ, 
which his true Church teaches and the nations be- 
lieve — all other Christian truths and facts justify 
themselves to the conscience and to the reason. 
But if the teaching of truth, and the setting an ex- 
ample, be held to be the pre-eminent aim and glory 
of Christ Jesus, then it is not possible to vindicate 
the inspiration of His Disciples and of His holy 
Evangelists ; it is not possible even to vindicate 
their common sense. 



134 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

INSPIRATION OF THE GOSPELS. 

WO of the Witnesses were set by the rest to 
write out the joint-witness of them all. Prov- 
identially two of the brethren were associated 
with them in that work — one the amanuensis of the 
Chief Apostle, the other the companion of the 
Apostle to the Gentiles ; and to their Gospels apos- 
tolic sanction gave equal authority with those of St. 
Matthew and St. John. The promise of the Lord 
that the Holy Spirit should aid his disciples in their 
witness to himself attaches to the whole of this tes- 
timony of the four Evangelists ; for it is the testi- 
mony of those to whom the promise was given. 
Where it did not come directly from his chosen Wit- 
nesses, they made it their own by their own acts. 
And St. John, who more than any other Evangelist 
brought from out the treasure-house of his own 
memory, in the name of all his brethren wrote, 
"We beheld his glory." 

When the Twelve were sent forth on their first 
mission our Lord told them (in words fully coming to 
pass after his own ministry on earth had ended) that 
they would be brought before governors and kings ; 
and he said, " Take no thought how or what ye 
shall speak. It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit 



PROMISE OF INSPIRATION. 1 35 

of your Father that speaketh in you." Re-uttering 
this on the Mount of Olives, he told his disciples 
that both thoughts and words should be given them : 
" Settle it in your hearts not to meditate before- 
hand what ye shall answer ; for I will give you a 
mouth and wisdom that your adversaries shall not 
be able to gainsay nor resist." His promise of di- 
vine aid then reached to their words, and surely it 
may have reached that far in the inspiration of 
their joint-witness to himself, given once for all 
and for all time in the holy Gospels. Why not ? 
A question that is here in lieu of a volume of argu- 
ment. 

Though familiar with the thought of the divine 
aid of the Witnesses, we can hardly call to mind the 
promises of such aid without being surprised at 
their fullness, and at their correspondence with the 
state of the disciples then ; and with that future, to 
which, before his crucifixion, Christ Jesus looked 
forward. " Now I go away, and none of you ask- 
eth me, Whither goest thou ? Sorrow hath filled 
your hearts. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of Truth, 
is come, he shall glorify me, for he shall receive of 
mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that 
the Father hath are mine. When the Spirit of 
Truth is come, he will guide you into all truth, and 
he will show you things to come." How perfectly 
all this agrees with the feelings of the disciples, 
and with what they themselves afterward became ! 
Then they could neither understand nor bear, what, 
before the sun rose and set again, they knew only 
too well. And how wonderful the change when 



136 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Ghost 
transformed them into Apostles! How they were 
guided into all the truth * in Christ, as in the Epis- 
tles to the Colossians and Ephesians ! And how 
they were shown the things that were to come, as 
in the Apocalypse ! 

" The Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Fa- 
ther will send in my name, he shall teach ycu all 
things." In accordance with common usage, these 
unlimited words are limited by the subject itself; 
they mean all things needed by the disciples in 
the work they had to do, and in that sense they 
were to be received by those who heard them. 
But may there not have been in them a larger 
sense, an infinite meaning, to be unfolded through 
endless ages ? It may be easy to say what his 
words must have meant to those who heard them, 
yet who shall say what their full meaning was to 
the Lord himself? In those words there may have 
been to him a prophecy and a promise of the in- 
crease of his people in knowledge that now is com- 
ing to pass in the earth, and their fulfillment in this 
and in other worlds may be far beyond the com- 
pass of the imagination. 

Even in the further promise in the next words, 
" And he shall bring to your remembrance whatso- 
ever I have said unto you," our Lord may have 
had in mind all his people forever. 

With much, and it may be with all, that our 
Lord said to his disciples, there blended some 
thought of others — in his last prayer he prayed for 
* The word has the article in the Greek — the Truth. 



PROMISE OF INSPIRATION. 1 37 

all those who, through them, should believe on his 
name: — yet this promise is to be construed as re- 
lating primarily, and it may be solely to his Wit- 
nesses. It is a promise of all the divine aid they 
needed in the fulfilling of their witness, and hence 
it implies more than a quickening of their mem- 
ories. There was need of more than such aid ; for 
it was not in the power of the children of men 
rightly to apprehend and truly to describe the Son 
of God. In the holy Gospels the promise was ful- 
filled in the selection his Evangelists made from all 
the Lord said and did ; and I would rest their inspi- 
ration mainly on the ground that, in their selection, 
they were so guided by the Spirit of Truth, that 
their portraiture of the Son of Man and Son of God 
has in each of their Gospels, and in the four Gos- 
pels taken together, a harmony and completeness 
that is beyond the possibilities of human genius. 

" When the Comforter is come whom I will send 
unto you, from the Father, he shall testify of me, 
and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been 
with me from the beginning." Here the disciples 
are spoken of as human witnesses ; they bear wit- 
ness because they have been with Christ from the 
beginning. And St. Peter gave the same reason in 
the same words why Justus and Matthias were se- 
lected, that one of them might be chosen to fill the 
vacancy in the number of the Witnesses. 

The question whether the divine element that 
entered into the witness of the Evangelists for 
higher ends, also secured an accuracy in every de- 
tail of every thing they touched upon beyond what 



138 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

human testimony is capable of in itself and by its 
own laws, is often discussed, as if those, who hold 
to the inspiration of those Witnesses, must answer 
that question in the affirmative. This assumption 
is usually associated with a narrow idea of the 
range of inspiration ; and it puts what may have 
been one of the minor results of inspiration on an 
equality with others of greater moment, as will ap- 
pear if we reflect on the nature of human testimony. 

Observation has convinced lawyers that the im- 
perfection of the human faculties is such that im- 
perfection in human testimony, like friction in ma- 
chinery, may be so reduced as to be almost inap- 
preciable, but cannot be gotten rid of. And I think 
it would be the authoritative judgment of the legal 
profession that in the testimony of well-informed, 
careful, and honest witnesses as to unimportant de- 
tails of complicated events and trains of events, 
differences and even contradictions would be found 
when the testimony of each was closely compared 
with itself and with that of the other witnesses ; 
and that in such cases, if the witnesses agreed as to 
all the important facts, their differences, and even 
their contradictions, as to incidents to which their 
attention was not specially called, and which the 
court and the jury take to be of no consequence, 
would confirm rather than weaken their evidence 
by showing their testimony was free from influence 
or collusion. 

In its very nature, human testimony is imperfect ; 
and yet, within variable limits, on the whole well 
understood and agreed upon, it is one of the guides 



NATURE OF TESTIMONY. 1 39 

of human life. Generally it is honest ; truth, not 
falsehood, is the common utterance ; and witnesses 
are apt to be careful as to what their words are to 
prove. Their opinion is generally right as to what 
details are unimportant ; they are inaccurate usually 
at points where they woul'd have guarded their 
words had it been of consequence, or as to things 
hardly noticed by the limited human faculties when 
not specially called to mark them. Such inaccura- 
cies come under the legal maxim, De mimimis non 
curat Lex — The law takes no account of trifles. 

The words perfect and imperfect have only a rel- 
ative meaning. As applied to aught save the divine, 
perfect can only mean that a thing is as good as it 
is in its nature to be. A thing is not imperfect, 
then, in the sense of bad, because it is not better 
than it can be ; and human testimony is perfect 
when, to establish a fact, it goes as far as human 
testimony can go. The divine element in the wit- 
ness of the Evangelists would be no less divine 
because of so-called imperfections that inhere in 
the nature of human testimony — so-called imper- 
fections, I say, meaning to question whether they 
be such in any proper sense. 

But this has nothing to do with such an alleged 
contradiction as that Matthew makes Bethlehem the 
home of the Holy Family, and St. Luke makes it 
Nazareth ; nor with such a mistake as St. Luke is 
said to have made in connecting with the birth of 
Jesus in Bethlehem a taxation said to have taken 
place some years afterward. If there were such er- 
rors and contradictions in the Gospels they would 



140 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

destroy the credibility of the Evangelists by show- 
ing gross ignorance or carelessness ; but the alleged 
minor differences that make up the larger part of 
the current argument against the Gospels come un- 
der the old legal maxim. 

I do not know that superhuman accuracy, in each 
and all of the minor details, was necessary to give 
confidence to the testimony of the holy Evangelists. 
If it were, then it would seem that the superhuman 
Power who brought about this superhuman result 
would have protected every minutiae of the tran- 
scripts of that testimony. But in the manuscripts 
of the Gospels differences are found ; thus, our ver- 
sion follows manuscripts that give the distance of 
Emmaus from Jerusalem at sixty furlongs, and the 
manuscript found by Tischendorf, in the convent on 
Mount Sinai, gives it at one hundred and sixty fur- 
longs. Still the text of the whole of the New Tes- 
tament is in a much more perfect state than that of 
other ancient writings ; the variations in its hundreds 
of manuscripts are checks upon each other, and by 
far the greater number of them are such as do not 
perceptibly affect the sense. They may have been 
permitted as safeguards against the idolatry of the 
letter, and they invalidate no article of the faith. 

Even on the theory of verbal inspiration, I see 
no ground for maintaining that there is no such im- 
perfection in the testimony of the Evangelists as 
merely stamps it as human testimony. It has be- 
come too common to take the phrase verbal inspi- 
ration, and to argue as if it were the exposition of 
a complicate and difficult doctrine with its explana- 



ACCURACY OF THE GOSPELS. 141 

tions, limitations, and reasons, and not merely its 
convenient symbol ; and thus a good name has be- 
come an unfortunate one. But word and thought 
are inseparable ; and those who reject verbal inspi- 
ration, rightly understood, must logically deny all 
inspiration. 

Yet I would not be understood to hold that there 
are inaccuracies of any sort in the holy Gospels. 
St. Augustine wrote to St. Jerome, who concurred 
with him : " I firmly believe that no one of the 
writers of Scripture has ever fallen into any error in 
writing." This was the faith of Christians in the 
fifth century, and in this century its truth as to the 
Gospels has been established as a matter of evi- 
dence. For never was testimony more severely 
tested than that of the Evangelists, and their accu- 
racy has been proved beyond all reasonable doubt. 

There are critics who think there are many errors 
in the old Hebrew Scriptures, but those who are 
anxious to find mistakes are apt to find them. 
Concerning the notions of those critics, opinions are 
contradictory among themselves. Such criticism 
has much to learn and much to unlearn. Thus : 
the Mosaic cosmology has been decried as unscien- 
tific and childish ; yet those who treat it thus know 
too little of ancient ideas concerning Time and the 
World, to understand the terms in which they are 
expressed. When the scientific revelations of the 
first chapter of Genesis are interpreted as an ancient 
Oriental sage would have interpreted them, they an- 
ticipate cosmological truths which modern science 
has of late begun to see. Again : even some or- 



142 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

thodox authorities say that the dates in several of 
the historical books of the Old Testament are in 
hopeless confusion, yet scholars of finer insight see 
that those dates (with the exception of a few cler- 
ical errors) must be correct. 

If there be in those ancient records, that recite 
the history of the central nation for thousands of 
years, seeming errors that the mistakes of tran- 
scribers of manuscripts for so many ages do not 
account for, and that, with our present knowledge, 
are inexplicable, and though their moral and spirit- 
ual revelations be incomplete, these things need not 
trouble our faith in Hebrew Scripture. There the 
time-plan of the world is so unrolled before the pa- 
triarch Noah that he foretells that God will enlarge 
Japheth, and he shall worship in the tabernacle of 
Shem, thus foreshadowing the historic relations of 
continents then unpeopled — Europe, from the days 
of Alexander until now, ever passing over into Asia 
to dwell, and Asia ever giving to Europe religion. 
There the time-plan of the world is further unfold- 
ed to the Prophet Daniel, so that he foretells the 
fourth and last universal empire, and beyond that, 
the dominion of the Son of Man. There it is prom- 
ised to Father Abraham that in his Son — for St. 
Paul interprets the prophecy not of many but of 
one — shall all the nations be blessed ; and thus the 
line of the fulfillment of the word of Hope in Eden 
is fixed in one people, and then, by other sure 
words of prophecy, in one family ; and the time- 
limit of the promise and the town in which it is to 
come to pass are made known. All the Hebrew 



ACCURACY OF THE GOSPELS. 143 

Scripture is a prophecy of One for whose coming 
the world would be made ready, so that all flesh 
might see his glory, and the plan of all human his- 
tory unrolls according to the pattern shown to the 
Hebrews of old. In that Scripture the delineations 
of the power, the wisdom, and the mercy of the 
Lord — as in Psalm ciii — have no parallel in the 
writings of men. Those sacred Scriptures lead on- 
ward and upward to Gospels wherein our Lord 
himself vouches for their inspiration. And we 
may well rest content in what St. Augustine and 
St. Jerome believed to be true of all Scripture, if it 
can be proved to be true of the Gospels, even 
though the difficulties of conclusively proving this at 
each and every point in those very ancient Hebrew 
Scriptures should as yet be insurmountable. 

Of the Gospels it can be, and it has been, 
proved. For accuracy the freely-given testimony 
of the Evangelists comes into a class by itself. In 
the Gospels there are no contradictions. There are 
satisfactory explanations of almost all their seeming 
differences, and of the four or five that alone re- 
main, explanations have been given that are, at 
least, quite possible. To ask more than this, as to 
such ancient and minute documents, of those who 
hold to the plenary inspiration of the Gospels, is 
the mere fanaticism of unbelief. 

It has been established, over and over again, that 
the accuracy of agreement in minute details in the 
Gospels, is such as was never reached in the testi- 
mony of any four witnesses to complicated events ; 
and in their testimony there is a multitude of unde- 



144 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

signed coincidences of so recondite and subtile a 
kind that they prove to demonstration that the ac- 
curacy of the Evangelists is beyond the nature of 
human testimony. Every one dismisses the thought 
of any collusion between them — it is but just to say 
that skeptics reject it as unworthy to be entertained 
— because the Evangelists so evidently intended to 
tell the truth ; and it should be dismissed for this 
decisive reason also : — no collusion, no comparing 
of what they wrote, no rewriting of what they had 
written, no art or device, could ever have wrought 
the harmony of their witness. Any good lawyer, 
familiar in courts with the variances and contradic- 
tions not only of false witnesses colluding to deceive, 
but of honest, intelligent witnesses, earnestly desir- 
ing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth, on closely, fairly, and without preju- 
dice comparing the witness of the four Evangelists, 
and testing, according to the severest legal rules of 
evidence, their agreement as to facts in all its forms 
and in all its depths, would come to the conviction 
that their harmony was not only beyond the reach 
of artifice, but beyond the possibilities of merely 
human testimony. 

I cite the words of one, who, early in life, began 
"his researches into the exact and delicate mean- 
ings of the Greek tenses, moods, prepositions and 
particles, and, in later years, brought to the study 
of the New Testament a complete mastery over the 
structure of the Greek language " — firmly persuaded 
that a faithful study of the holy Gospels, whether 
in the Greek or in the English only, creates in 



TRUTH OF THE GOSPELS, 145 

every candid soul the feeling which he utters with 
such heartfelt conviction : 

" A very minute investigation of the Greek of the 
New Testament, studied grammatically with a care- 
ful consideration of the real and true meaning of 
every case, tense, and mood, of every particle, even 
of the very order of the words, so far as my knowl- 
edge of the niceties and exquisite discriminations 
of the language has enabled me to master the sub- 
ject, has only served to deepen the convictions that 
the holy Scriptures are indeed in very truth the 
word of God, inspired by his Holy Spirit ; that they 
are in the original minutely, scrupulously, marvel- 
ously exact in every word, syllable, and letter. I 
cannot express too strongly the awe and admiration 
with which I rise daily from this microscopic study 
of the New Testament. The more minutely I look 
into the force, the exactness, the deep meaning of 
even single words, the profounder becomes my rev- 
erence, the more awful my sense, of the importance 
of every jot and every tittle of Holy Writ. Deeply 
and awfully convinced I am that the Scriptures are 
not merely the work of good, holy, inspired men, but 
that they are really the voice of God, that we must 
approach them, therefore, with the confidence, the 
reverence, the unshaken belief in their correctness, 
truthfulness, depth, importance, and infinite wis- 
dom, due to words which issue from the mouth of 
God himself." * 

* Rev. William Sewell, D.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
the University of Oxford, author of " Introduction to the Dialogues 
of Plato," etc., etc. Died A.D. 1874. 
10 



146 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

It is the glory of the Gospels that through their 
inspired witness to the Son of Man and Son of God, 
all may attain to a knowledge of the life of the Re- 
deemer and Lord, as true, as real, as that of his 
own disciples — may come into their places and in 
this wisdom "have fellowship with them." Yet it 
is never to be forgotten that the Gospel is a book 
sealed, till its seals are broken by the Spirit ; for it 
is written, " No man ca?i say that Jesus is the Lord 
but by the Holy Ghost!' There is always the need 
of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Evangelists bore 
true witness to the Lord ; and the Holy Spirit will 
ever make their witness a living witness to all who 
in sincerity pray for his help — even as it is written 
by the brother of our Lord, " If any man lack wis- 
dom, let him ask of God, and it shall be given him." 



PAET SECOND. 



CHAPTER I. 

STYLE OF THE EVANGELISTS. 

tF the chief end and aim of a Gospel be seen — 
if it be clear that the construction of each 
Gospel is so fitted to its purpose that of itself 
it is a sufficient witness to the Saviour for men to 
believe in him — if the correspondence of the apos- 
tolic Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John and the 
affinity of the written with the oral Gospel be well 
understood — then the answers to many questions 
that unbelief has raised and the unreasonableness 
of much of the doubt concerning the Gospels are 
plain. A knowledge of these things clears up so 
much concerning the Gospels, that we might almost 
be thankful to infidels for driving us to thorough- 
ness in studying all that pertains to their construc- 
tion. It were well if we were as earnest to learn 
as they are to destroy. 

There is much that has to be thought out before 
all that has been said against the Gospels as frag- 
ments and traditions can be cleared up ; but before 
treating of those things that in the eyes of some 
have given this character to writings whose unity 
and whose truthfulness is divine, let a word be said 



I48 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

of their style. Each Gospel resembles each other, 
for each leads to the Cross. All the Evangelists 
had the same purpose, yet each of the Gospels has 
a character of its own. St. Matthew could not once 
draw such a picture as St. Peter always draws ; St. 
Mark could not have planned St. Matthew's Gospel ; 
neither could have written St. Luke's Gospel ; nor 
could St. Luke have written either of theirs. And 
yet the first three Evangelists, from the order, the 
facts, and the phrases common to them all, may 
seem to have the same style. But there are few 
who think of the style of the Evangelists at all ; 
and this can have no higher praise, for a good 
style does not draw attention from the thought to 
itself. To speak only when there is something to 
be said, to say just that and no more, is the perfec- 
tion of utterance, and this perfection belongs to the 
Evangelists. 

In their writings the thought is plainly seen. 
Such transparency is a quality of style that comes 
from the character of a writer's mind, and cannot be 
given by training in the schools. Some book- 
learned men quietly assume that the style of Mat- 
thew, Mark, and John is poverty-stricken, because 
they were not book-learned men. But ornament 
would have been out of place in a Gospel, and the 
Evangelists were too earnest to think of it. Yet 
nothing is more readable than the Gospels. Noth- 
ing is more translatable. Their word-painting is so 
clear in outline that when transferred into another 
language the picture is there, the frame only is 
changed. The thoughts of the writers of the Epis- 



STYLE OF THE EVANGELISTS. 149 

ties are more with those to whom they wrote ; those 
of the Evangelists are with the Lord only. His 
overshadowing glory makes them afraid. Their 
sense of the divinity of the man Christ Jesus is in 
their hush of awe, their stillness of adoration. The 
Lord is in his holy temple, let the earth keep silence 
before Him ! 

The time is nigh at hand when unbelievers will 
change their tone, and say the Evangelists were the 
great masters of history, and the power of the Gos- 
pel is due to their literary excellence. In this there 
will be just enough of truth to do the most harm ; 
for the literary excellence of the holy Gospels is one 
of the many elements of their power. Goethe — 
the great critic in the kingdom of this world, whose 
like has not arisen in the kingdom of grace — said of 
Sir Walter Scott, " I see in his writings a new art, 
with laws of its own ;" and that is true of the Holy 
Evangelists. " The Ariosto of the North " taught 
others to do some things better than he did them 
himself; but the divine historic art of the Evangel- 
ists remains, and that divine art will remain, unpar- 
alleled and inimitable. 

Could I parade the good sayings of men any 
thing but good, a long roll of names, and with them 
a long roll of religious names, might be called to 
witness to the literary excellence of the Gospels. 
But the whole of this critical estimate has two sides 
to it. Even Westcott can speak of the style of the 
Gospels as " confused," and most critics hold that 
the Gospels come far short of what might be desired 
in a historic point of view. I find it one of the 



150 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

causes of this underestimate of the historic merit of 
the Evangelists, that they do not mark times and 
seasons, and set forth events in chronological se- 
quence, with a painful and confusing exactness. 
For deficiencies rashly asserted and unwisely con- 
ceded even Ellicott can give as a reason, " That an- 
cient chroniclers gave little heed to dates, and that 
the detailed sequence of biographical narrative was 
unknown among the Jews." The reply, like the 
accusation, has only an illusive show of pertinency. 
The writers of the Old Testament took pains to 
give their dates as well as they could without the 
help of that humble but useful thing, the almanac. 
The Hebrew Evangelists were not deficient in mark- 
ing dates. They had their reasons for omitting to 
mark some epochs, and they mark some with dates 
of their own. Psychologic, moral, and spiritual de- 
pendencies were more to them than chronological 
ones ; and their critics often mistake a grouping of 
events by laws of higher power for a disregard of 
the law of time. What seems to them disorder is 
order too philosophic for their comprehension. 

To the Evangelists actions were of value as they 
witnessed to the soul from which the action came. 
They give more than the outward form of things. 
In tracing the spiritual sequence of events their 
sight is quick, and fine, and far. In the Gospels the 
future is in the present, and there nothing takes us 
wholly by surprise. 

The notion that the Evangelists were heedless of 
times and seasons comes from their not giving the 
day and the year of the birth of our Lord more than 



THE SILENCE OF SCRIPTURE. 151 

from any thing else. There is nothing in St. Mat- 
thew's Gospel from which that day and year can be 
determined. The blank is not filled by St. Mark ; 
nor by St. Luke, usually so careful as to times ; and 
St. John, the last Evangelist and last Apostle, is 
silent concerning those dates, like the Evangelists 
before him. This silence came from carelessness, 
or from ignorance, or design. No one who marks 
the thoughtfulness of the Evangelists will say that it 
came from carelessness. No one who marks that 
in St. Luke's Gospel the Blessed Mother herself tells 
of the birth of her Son and Lord, or who remem- 
bers that her home was in the house of St. John, 
will say it was from ignorance. All who believe in 
the inspiration of the holy Gospels will confess there 
was some divine reason why His Evangelists say 
nothing from which the time of the birth of the 
Lord can be determined, even as they say nothing 
of his form and features, and thus tempt no man to 
the irreverence of trying to mold the image of the 
Lord, or to picture his likeness. 

By their silence the Holy Scriptures often teach 
as plainly as by their words. The silence of the 
Holy Scripture as to the day and year of the birth 
of the Lord was ordained ; and God has so hidden 
both of those dates that man will never find them 
out. From this speaking silence of His Scriptures 
there seems to be the sure inference, that the cele- 
bration of a day as Christ's birthday will not forever 
tend to the highest degree of faith in Him as the 
Eternal Word. The divinely-ordained silence of the 
Blessed Mother and of the holy Evangelists as to 



152 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the day of the Lord's birth seems to teach that the In- 
carnation, and, by irresistible inference, the Atone- 
ment also, belong to all time, and not to any one 
time ; and that the setting apart of days as peculiar- 
ly theirs has no place in the worship of Him who is 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. And my 
argument is, that here, where the charge of not set- 
ting forth times and seasons bears hardest against 
the holy Evangelists, just here is seen the finger 
of God. 

Near the beginning of the earliest Gospel there is 
a verse that more, perhaps, than any thing else, save 
the silence as to the time of the Lord's birth, has 
led to an undervaluing of the historic qualities of 
the Evangelists : "Now, when Jesus was born in 
Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the king, 
there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, 
saying, Where is he that is born king of the Jews? 
for we have seen his star in the east, and are come 
to worship him." Here the Nativity seems to be 
mentioned rather for the sake of another event than 
for its own sake ; and its date is no date at all, for it 
has the breadth of a long reign. 

This most unfortunate of verses has baffled the 
transatlantic scholars ; whether orthodox or not, 
they are well agreed that its geographic and his- 
toric terms give no means of knowing whence the 
pilgrims came, or who the pilgrims were. There is 
nothing very strange in this, for the geography of 
Western Asia dates from this century, and the his- 
toric criticism of the Scriptures dates not much 
further back than its beginning. In its better 



SECOND CHAPTER OF ST. MATTHEW. 1 53 

forms that criticism has met with good success, 
though here it failed, where success was easier than 
failure. And yet here scholars can hardly be said 
to have failed, for they did not try to succeed. St. 
Matthew's terms had no definite meaning to them, 
and they assumed that there is very little meaning 
in them. And if they really be as meaningless as 
they are to their critics, then, taken together with 
St. Matthew's strange way of alluding to the birth 
of the Lord, and his omission to name the day and 
the year thereof, they would countenance the error 
that this Evangelist, at least, was deficient in his- 
toric qualities. » 

But elsewhere I have shown that by his term 
Magi (wisely kept in the Vulgate, but in the En- 
glish version vaguely mistranslated wise men) St. 
Matthew told those to whom he wrote, who those 
pilgrims were. The meaning of his term was plain 
to them, and he knew it. In his father's time 
Herod had fled before the Parthian horsemen in 
Judea. In his time a great many Jews — as many as 
there were in Palestine — lived in the provinces of 
the Persian (then the Parthian) Empire. Of those 
were the " dwellers in Mesopotamia, the Parthians, 
Medes, Elamites," who were present at the Pente- 
cost. The chief lines of the traffic of the East and 
the Far-East with the Phoenician sea-coast and with 
the land of Egypt, ran through Palestine. The 
Jews of Palestine were as familiar with the Par- 
thian Empire as the British are now with India; 
and hence all the Jews of Palestine were as familiar 
with the term Magi (the name of the priests of the 



154 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Persian, and of its successor the Parthian, Empire) 
as commercial London is to-day with the name 
Brahmin. 

St. Matthew's geographic terms, the East and the 
Far-East, the only ones at his command, curious- 
ly well fitted his purpose. They clearly pointed 
out both the empire from whence the pilgrims 
came, and in what province of that empire they 
were when the star of our Lord shone into our 
heavens. His terms — colloquial household terms 
in Palestine — were not so clear outside of that coun- 
try ; and, where his Gospel passed over from Asia 
into Europe, their meaning became obscure, and it 
was lost sight of in the Dark Ages. 

At every point the first two chapters of St. Mat- 
thew can be vindicated ; but here I can only fur- 
ther say that, as St. Matthew intended to mark the 
fulfilling of prophecy, his bare mention of Bethle- 
hem in the first verse of his second chapter seems 
to make against the carrying out of his manifold 
design, but only for an instant, for almost imme- 
diately he calls in the wisdom of all the scribes to 
witness that Bethlehem was the foreordained birth- 
place. And though St. Matthew, like the other 
Evangelists, does not name the day or the year of 
our Lord's birth, it should be noted that before the 
chapter ends he narrows down its time to near that 
of Herod's death ; and in this there is more than at 
first appears, for the end of Herod's reign was an 
epoch with the Jews. 

The most important date after our Lord's birth 
is that of the full beginning of his Ministry ; and 



DATE OF THE MINISTRY. 1 55 

here, again, the charge against the Evangelists of 
deficiency in marking times and seasons is counte- 
nanced by their not giving the day, the month, or 
the year of that beginning. But God's dates are 
not all in the almanac. His Scriptures mark times 
and seasons in ways of their own. To his inspired 
Evangelists that month and year seemed hardly of 
more consequence than the hour or the minute of 
the hour ; but they knew of a divine chronology in 
which that date was of spiritual significance, and 
there they recorded it : " Now when Jesus had heard 
that John was cast into prison He departed into 
Galilee. . . . From that hour He began to preach." 
Thus St. Matthew ; and thus St. Mark, " Now after 
that John was cast into prison Jesus came into 
Galilee preaching the Gospel and saying, The time 
is fulfilled." 

An earlier Ministry, and in Judea, is described in 
the first three chapters of the last Gospel. Toward 
the end of that course of events St. John, by a 
passing allusion to the near imprisonment of the 
Baptist, recognizes the date which the Gospels of 
St. Matthew and St. Mark had made well known 
to the whole Congregation. Before that time the 
acts of our Lord, like those of an heir to a vacant 
throne before his coronation, were of kingly signifi- 
cance ; yet two of the earlier Evangelists carefully 
mark that the King did not put forth his full 
regal power until after his herald was cast into 
prison. 

It is written, " The wrath of man shall praise 
God, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain." 



156 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

St. Matthew and St. Mark teach a lesson, beyond 
even the lesson in that instructive Scripture, through 
the relation they disclose between the imprisonment 
of the Herald and the full beginning of the ministry 
of the King. They teach that the hour of a seem- 
ing victory of the darkness is the hour of a real 
advance of the light. They reveal that when 
iniquity reaches its bound, then the word of God 
goes forth with full power. So it was when Christ 
Jesus began His Ministry. So it was when He 
suffered on the Cross. So it was when the first 
martyr died. So it will ever be in the kingdom of 
grace. 

To this all history testifies ; but no one can bind 
all the sheaves in the Holy Land. We must leave 
this truth, and glance again at the opening of St. 
Matthew's Gospel. After relating the visit of the 
Magi, the flight, the return, and the dwelling in 
Nazareth, St. Matthew goes right on to say, u In 
those days came John the Baptist preaching in the 
wilderness ;" and to him Jesus goes for baptism. 
Here there is a time for which there seems to be 
no measure of any kind ; yet, on looking more 
closely, it is the interval from childhood to man- 
hood. All the Evangelists thus pass over times of 
which they have nothing to say ; as when St. Luke 
passes from the presentation of the holy Child in 
the temple to the dwelling again of the holy family 
in Nazareth, or from the Temptation to the Ministry 
in Galilee. The Evangelists avoid interrupting the 
onflowing of their Gospels by any methodical inter- 
position of dates ; yet sometimes they mark the 



DATES IN THE GOSPELS. 1 5/ 

very hour; as when, though half a century had 
passed, St. John so naturally remembers that it 
was about the tenth hour of the day when Jesus 
first spoke to him. St. Luke dates his narrative as 
precisely as the old Greek chroniclers. The other 
Evangelists make us feel that they could have done 
so ; and one who reads their Gospels, in sympathy 
with their spiritual aim, never feels any lack of 
chronology. 

That St. Luke was not an eye-witness of the 
Lord may have had something to do with his care- 
ful marking of dates, for its effect was somewhat as 
if he had been much farther off, in time, from the 
life of Christ than the other Evangelists ; yet, like 
the others, he had heard the Gospel orally taught, 
and the style of his Gospel, like theirs, is colloquial. 
When those who have been actors in great events 
talk about them, they give little heed to the date 
of those events, because they are already dated in 
the minds of those with whom they are conversing. 
And for the date of the Gospels there is, it seems to 
me, a delicately persuasive evidence in the fact that 
their writers deal with dates just as men naturally 
do when speaking of things that took place in their 
own generation. Thus, St. Mark unconsciously 
proves the date of his Gospel by not giving to it 
any date at all, and by his, at once, bringing in John 
the Baptist as one whom every body knew ; for 
though writing in the city of Rome, and though 
all the world has read what he wrote, yet while 
writing he had much in mind the little colony of 
Roman Jews, whose memory or knowledge of the 



158 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Baptist was like his own. And in the Holy Gos- 
pels the general and the special time-marks are 
as many as can be reasonably looked for. They 
are in the handwriting of eye-witnesses, and the 
most masterly invention could not have given such 
fine touches of verisimilitude to fabrications in a 
later age. 



TIME OF ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 1 59 



? 



CHAPTER II. 

TIME OF ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 

AM now to consider a peculiarity of St. Mat- 
thew's Gospel through which, by chance, I dis- 
covered the time and the circumstances in which 
that Gospel was written :— by chance, I say, as did 
the soldier who said so well, " Chance is but a name 
for the unknown combinations of infinite power." 
And, as a fitting preface to this discussion, I con- 
fide to my friendly and tireless reader the slowly 
wrought out purpose that led, at last, to that chance 
discovery. In my boyhood the old Roman days 
seemed to live again as I construed Cicero's oration 
against Catiline, but I could not make the days of 
the disciples so life-like. My imagination could 
not cross the great gulf between the Occident and 
the Orient. The world of the East seemed unreal, 
it was so unlike the Western world : though, in 
spiritual insight, in depth of conviction, in the tur- 
moil of passion, the calm of repose, the Eastern 
world is the more real world of the two. Little 
then was known of the East, of its geography, its 
history, its ways of life. The apparition of John 
the Baptist then startled the historic sense t as in his 
own time it startled the Jewish conscience : for then 
there were none to tell (what Farrar and Geikie 



l6o THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

have not yet found out) that John was sent in his 
childhood away into the desert, was brought up for 
safety in the black tents, and that he came preach- 
ing in the wilderness of Judea, in dress and manner 
of life, an Arab, such as the traveler now meets with 
in the plain of Esdraelon. There was nothing like 
Judea and the Jews, in the whole Eastern world. 
Robinson and Smith were then in the Holy Land, 
busy with its geography, but the unequaled results 
of their joint labors had not been given to the world. 
There were some means of learning about the ways 
of the populace of old Rome, what, with Calmet's 
help, could not be learned of those of the people of 
Jerusalem ; yet I longed to make myself as much 
at home in the Holy City as, whether truly or not, 
I seemed to be in Rome. "A boy's thoughts are 
long thoughts." The seed then buried in some 
corner of the heart was to spring up, but years 
passed before the bearing of fruit. 

In my college days I gained a bird's-eye view of 
the fields of knowledge as then mapped out and ex- 
plored, and I made up my mind to keep up with 
the thought of my time. I saw its currents sweep- 
ing more and more against the bulwarks of the 
faith. Yet neither the daring that assailed the 
holy Scriptures nor the questions as to their con- 
struction, to which no answer came, troubled my 
faith. My knowledge of the masterpieces of hu- 
man genius sufficed for me to say, as I read some 
of the plainer or grander words of Holy Writ, "These 
are not the thoughts of man." Whether the prob- 
lems of unbelief were solved in my life-time or not, 



EARLY ASPIRATIONS. l6l 

I knew that time would bring their solution, as it 
had brought the solution of the problem of the Zo- 
diac of Denderah. I listened to the doubts that 
troubled the air, in the spirit that believes and yet 
inquires, and would not suffer what I did know to 
be contradicted by what I did not know. I well 
remember the one hour when, wearily revolving 
the monotonous, scientific, historic, and critical 
questionings of the Bible, I said in my heart, noth- 
ing doubting, " Open the book and read ; the Word 
of God will prove itself worthy of the Creator, as 
do the heavens, the mountains, and the sea." The 
will can hold the mind in abeyance, so that, for the 
moment, the known seems almost as if unknown, 
and thus old truths may have something of the 
freshness of new truth. Calling this power into 
play, I opened the New Testament and read page 
on page. The world of Scripture opened before 
me, as I read, with a glory that I felt as though I 
could make others see ; and the time came when 
that feeling shaped my life. 

I determined to carry out my youthful aspiration 
to make myself at home in Jerusalem. But I did 
not begin as far back as the days of the patriarchs. 
I thought it better suited the shortness of life to 
join the caravan of forty thousand pilgrims who, five 
hundred years before the birth of Christ, went up 
from their Babylonian exile to the desolation of 
Jerusalem, and there laid anew the foundations of 
the Hebrew State. I dwelt there, in thought, until 
the power of the Persians passed away, and, follow- 
ing in the footsteps of Alexander, colonies of Greeks 
11 



1 62 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

came building cities and teaching their language to 
Syria ; and thence onward, through the glorious 
restoration of Independence, through the hateful 
coming in of the Romans and the evil tyranny of 
the Idumaean Herod. 

The six hundred preceding years are the avenue 
through which to approach the years from the death 
of King Herod to the fall of Jerusalem ; yet I found, 
to my surprise, that they were among the least ex- 
plored periods of history ; and, but for Dr. Raphall, 
their history would have been a repellant roll of 
meaningless events. The learned rabbi taught me 
how to feel the pulses of that time. Its study be- 
came a fascination. Its memorials were few, and 
within my reach. I read the scanty Hebraic litera- 
ture of those days. I studied the graphic pages of 
that fine old reprobate, Josephus, until it almost 
seemed as if his pages had never been studied be- 
fore. I began to know something about the He- 
brew people — their struggles and vicissitudes, the 
changes of their language, the swift glories of their 
heroic age, their sects, their politics, their modes of 
thought and ways of life — from the time when 
Daniel was chief of the Wise Men of the East and 
the Far-East, until, in the year of grace, Christ Jesus 
was born in Bethlehem of Judea. 

Then, as the first step toward making the days of 
the disciples life-like, I made out lists of the names 
of all the men and women in each one of the four 
Gospels, thinking to bring together all that was said 
of them in each, and in all, of the Gospels. The 
names were somewhat different in each of the lists ; 



BEARINGS OF THE DISCOVERY. 1 63 

and, running them over, and recalling what I could 
remember of the men and women named in each, 
the thought came into my mind that in the earliest 
Gospel there was a designed secrecy and silence as to 
certain persons and events. I quickly took in the 
points of the case, and was soon assured that this 
was the true conclusion. 

I saw the bearings of this discovery upon the 
criticism of St. Matthew's Gospel. In the style of 
that Gospel, artless and unstudied though it be, the 
characteristics of the same mind are every-where to 
be seen. As no one else would have written any 
line just as Tacitus did, so St. Matthew wrote no 
paragraph of his Gospel just as any one else would 
have written it. Every-where the organic life of his 
Gospel is felt, and the bristling titles and closely 
printed tomes of those who, like Ewald, have denied 
its unity have not proved to me the critical sagacity 
of any of them. I see their arguments, and I see 
through them. Yet I see, as clearly as any of those 
theorists can, that St. Matthew's Gospel has at one 
or two points a fragmentary look. Were this inex- 
plicable it would be nothing against the fact that 
his Gospel is the product of one mind. But I think 
I can show that it is St. Matthew's caution as to 
certain persons and events that gives this appear- 
ance to his Gospel at those points. I am now to 
prove this caution ; and, by the same evidence, to 
prove that St. Matthew's Gospel was written as early 
as the time of the persecution that began with the 
murder of St. Stephen. 



164 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

FOR at least seven years after the veil of the 
Temple was rent in twain the Christians were, in 
outward form, a sect of the Jews. They continued 
daily in the Temple, their women were purified, 
their first-born sons were redeemed. 

Sects were not unknown among the children of 
Abraham ; and it was the underlying thought of 
Gamaliel's argument — a noble example of the elo- 
quence of the Sanhedrim — that an everlasting relig- 
ion had nothing to fear from a sect that would en- 
dure but for a time. His idea was much the same 
as that of the Jews of the present day, with whom 
Christianity is a Hebrew aberration, whose long- 
enduring course is running out. Gamaliel's policy 
then seemed possible and politic. As the Jews did 
concede that John the Baptist was a Prophet, they 
could concede that Jesus was a Prophet ; and, though 
His dream of a spiritual religion had touched the 
imperishable Temple, yet the vitality of His error 
died with Him. The Jews could tolerate a heresy 
whose consequences were so little foreknown, even 
by those who held it. The most far-sighted could 
see no danger to religion from sectarians held to- 
gether by insane devotion to a malefactor, who had 
openly perished in the sight of all the people. 

On the other hand, those whom we have to call 
Christians — a little in advance of the time when 
they were known by that name — believed that 
Jesus was the Christ who would soon come again. 
But their hope in his coming was Hebraic. They 
looked for him to be King of the race because he 
was to be King of the Jews. " Out of Zion was to 



CHANGE IN THE JEWISH FEELING. 1 65 

go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from 
Jerusalem." The significance of the Sacrifice, that 
made needless the symbolism of the temple-wor- 
ship, was not well understood. Jesus said that He 
came not to destroy, but to fulfill the law, and those 
words seemed in harmony with the hopes they 
cherished. Thus there seemed to be no need of a 
fatal breach between the old and the new, and, for 
a time, there was a truce between the Jews and 
the Christians. The as yet nameless sect provoked 
little curiosity and less fear. 

The citizens of Jerusalem knew less of Jesus 
than we are apt to think. His person was hardly 
known to them. His comings had been few, His 
tarryings brief, and when the city was thronged 
with strangers. At His last visit they cried, " Who 
is this ? " Those who answered, " Jesus, the Proph- 
et of Nazareth in Galilee," were Galileans. 

Deep the mark of his words on the souls of a 
few, and the city shuddered at his crucifixion. All 
heard of his resurrection, a few thousands believed 
it ; but the city beheld Jesus no more. Feasts and 
passovers went on. Millions of strangers came and 
went away. A metropolis sees much and forgets 
much. After the death of Jesus, as after his birth, 
the few remembered, the many forgot, the signs and 
wonders. 

Seven years after the crucifixion Jewish indif- 
ference changed to open hostility. St. Stephen 
was charged with saying that Jesus of Nazareth 
would destroy the Temple and change the Law. 
His defense tacitly admits that the charge was sub- 



1 66 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

stantially true. He made a historical argument to 
prove that the Hebrew religion did not belong to a 
family, a tribe, or a people, but to all the world. 
Some of his judges had heard it before, for they 
would not suffer his argument to go on. St. Ste- 
phen felt it was useless to plead, and he turned 
upon his enemies with invectives that hastened, 
but did not cause, his murder. His taking off had 
been planned before ; and not without good reason 
in the eyes of his judges, for St. Stephen took the 
same ground as to the ritual of Moses that was 
afterward taken by St. Paul. He taught that Jesus 
was instead of the holy Temple. He reaffirmed 
that for which Jesus had been tried, condemned, 
and punished. In this St. Stephen was not alone. 
His judges knew that he had a following. It was 
clear to the Jews that the crucifixion had not put 
an end to the Nazarene. The delusion was grow- 
ing, not dying out. The Nazarene was becoming a 
power in the land, and something had to be done. 

The Jews were too weak and they were too saga- 
cious to strike at the witnesses to the Resurrection. 
That was neither possible nor politic. No law 
made it a crime to have seen Jesus, who had died, 
alive again ; and the number of the men and women 
who had seen him was both too few and too many. 
The risen Lord had not shown himself openly. 
The witnesses to his resurrection were a small 
company, and yet the five hundred who saw him 
at one time were too many to be made way with. 
The trial and the condemnation of two or three of 
the common people would avail nothing ; it would 



STRONG MEASURES PREFERRED. 167 

neither destroy the witness of the others nor their 
own. Dying enthusiasts adhere to their convic- 
tions, and their testimony, sealed with their blood, 
is more convincing than ever. The Sanhedrim had 
not the legal right to put any one to death ; and it 
was far from safe to do it by a public tumult, or a 
private execution. It was wiser to treat the wit- 
ness to Christ as fraudulent, or as the delusion of a 
few enthusiasts. 

Such would have been their shrewdest conclusion 
had their power to punish been as great as they 
wished. They had to go further back than the 
witness to the Resurrection. They had again to 
stamp down the pretense that Jesus was the Son 
of God, for His Resurrection was an almost irresist- 
ible inference from his Divine humanity, and a lit- 
tle evidence would prove what was antecedently so 
credible. 

Those strong men preferred strong measures. 
They determined to punish some of those who, by 
colluding with Jesus when alive, had made them- 
selves liable to indictment for having aided and 
abetted in the crime of blasphemy. Of course the 
Jews tried to keep their design a secret, and it did 
not become public through its success. St. Luke 
says nothing of it, but his sketch of the persecution 
that began with the arrest of St. Stephen accords 
with such a design. The record may seem to be 
meager and insufficient ; but as a few pencil marks 
from the hand of a master, so there, a few lines tell 
a great deal. They may even suggest more than 
was known to St. Luke, just as a portrait may 



1 68 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

have in it more of a man's history than the artist 
knew. 

That persecution was not one of those casual 
outbreaks that are common in passionate Oriental 
cities of divers races and religions. It began in a 
session of the Council. The judges of St. Stephen 
were his executioners, and Saul, who was conspicu- 
ous at the martyrdom, was a pupil of Gamaliel. 
How long the persecution lasted is unknown ; but 
for a time, certainly, there was no intent to let the 
heretics go, and it lasted long enough to fill the 
prisons. Men, women, and children could not 
readily escape from that walled and guarded town; 
and in hiding they waited to dispose of their effects, 
for their sick to get well, for a safe chance of flight ; 
and months may have passed before the Jews 
changed their purpose and drove all the heretics 
out of the city. 

On looking into the record of this persecution 
we are struck with some things that are peculiar. 
Though every house was broken into, yet not one 
of the Twelve was arrested ; though a multitude 
were dragged to prison, both men and women, not 
one of them was tried. Such is the impresssion 
St. Luke gives, and his narrative at least makes it 
certain that there was no public trial or execution 
of any person of such note, that he felt called upon 
to speak of it. But it can hardly have been that in 
such an outbreak of rage and zeal there was no 
bloodshed. This idea harmonizes the history in 
St. Luke with the frequent allusions to those days 
in St. Paul's speeches and letters. St. Paul says 



THE SENDING TO DAMASCUS. 1 69 

that he voted (in the minority, perhaps) that here- 
tics should be put to death, that he tried to make 
them blaspheme, (whether any of them did so may 
be doubted,) and that he persecuted them unto 
death. Possibly these last words refer to his intent, 
or to the death of Stephen ; but the punishment of 
scourging in the synagogues was permitted by the 
Romans, and, at such a time, it is likely to have 
been inflicted with such a cruel disregard of the 
usual merciful restrictions, that, in some cases, 
death may have ensued. And due regard being 
-had to the way that St. Paul is speaking, if even 
one aged or infirm person was tortured to death, it 
might answer to his words. They point to horrors 
that harrowed up his soul as they stood up in the 
accusing past, yet were not of sufficient consequence 
to be noted by the historian. 

The mission of Saul to Damascus falls in exactly 
with our general view. Not till Jerusalem and its 
suburbs had been thoroughly searched could there 
have been any thought of searching elsewhere. But 
when that was unsuccessful the question arose, 
Where can those whom they wished to seize have 
gone? There was an idea that they might have 
fled to Damascus, and pursuers, armed with a man- 
date from the high-priest, started for that city. 
They were in great earnest, for the distance was 
considerable and they set out on an uncertainty. 
This is implied in the words, " If they found any of 
that way." And if they did, what then ? Were 
they to accuse them before the synagogue and there 
have them punished ? No ; they were to bring 



170 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

those whom, perchance, they might find, in bonds to 
Jerusalem. Why bring them to Jerusalem? There 
were in Jerusalem heretics enough, some thousands 
of them, and there were already prisoners enough. 
The number of those whom they could have brought 
to Jerusalem in bonds could not have been many. 
And those whom they could not find in Jerusalem, 
and hoped to find in Damascus, must have been 
few in number, and they must have been persons 
of note. 

All is clear and consistent on the supposition that 
certain persons were sought for ; and what St. Luke 
records might more properly be called an inquisi- 
tion than a persecution, were it not for the final 
enforced scattering abroad of the whole Congrega- 
tion, when the secret purpose of the inquisitors had 
failed. 

For whom were the inquisitors searching? Was 
it for the Twelve ? Within the city itself they all 
outstayed the persecution, and as no miracle hid 
them from the eyes of the Jews, we must conclude 
they were not specially sought for. For whom, 
then, were the inquisitors searching? I think we 
shall prove that they were searching for the family 
of Bethany, and for the Blessed Mother of the cru- 
cified Son. 

Bethany was one of the suburbs of Jerusalem. 
The miracle there wrought was the immediate oc- 
casion of the arrest and trial of Jesus, though the 
hatred of the Jews had kindled to the heat of mur- 
der before the raising of Lazarus, and even the 
neighborhood of the unholy city had become so 



THE PURPOSE TO KILL LAZARUS. 171 

unsafe that Jesus stayed on the eastern bank of the 
Jordan. While there Mary and her sister Martha 
sent this message, " Lord, he whom thou lovest is 
sick." And, when He would go to Bethany, the 
thoughtful Thomas said, " Let us go and die with 
him." These words disprove the notion that most 
of the disciples were then away from their Master ; 
His time was too near for that ; but they do prove 
not only the chivalry of St. Thomas, but his sagacity. 
He judged rightly of the peril of the place and time ; 
for, as soon as the chief priests knew that Jesus was 
again so near, and heard of what He did at Bethany, 
they took counsel how they might kill Him. 

At that time it was their plan to kill Lazarus 
also. Only St. John records this, and he does not 
say how Lazarus escaped. But such was the wealth 
and rank of the family of Bethany that its love for 
Jesus greatly enraged the rulers of the Jews ; and, 
as Mary foresaw the Lord's death, she may have 
seen the danger of Lazarus, and the family have 
had the power to guard against it. Perhaps they 
did so because of some intimation from their Lord ; 
all we know is, that the Jews then failed to kill 
Lazarus. But such was their purpose then ; and 
this purpose would naturally revive in the midst 
of the provocations that led them to murder St. 
Stephen. 

The Mother of Jesus had been his accomplice in 
the crime of declaring himself the Son of God ; a 
crime for which the Jews said that Jesus had been 
fairly tried by the law of Moses and justly con- 
demned. In their judgment, she was worthy of 



172 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

death ; and they thought that nothing would so 
effectually stay the mania about the Son, as the 
trial and punishment of the Mother. 

As such was the intent of the inquisitors, they 
had to inquire into the lineage and kindred of Jesus, 
of which the Jews of Jerusalem knew little. Jesus 
had been called the Son of David, but it might 
have been in a figurative sense. His kindred were 
humble people, who had lived in an out-of-the-way 
mountain village, in a distant corner of the land. 
It is somewhat probable that even His chosen dis- 
ciples — save Peter, James, and John — were not 
well-known, as none of them were arrested. Be 
that as it may, witnesses had to be hunted up, and 
from among the heretics. But it was not so easy 
to find out who the heretics were. Their observ- 
ance of the sacrament was private, and they kept 
up the rites of the Hebrew religion. In dress, man- 
ners, and looks they were Jews. At an earlier time 
" they were in favor with the people," " a great 
company of the priests became obedient to the 
faith;" little or no concealment of their doctrines, 
or of themselves, was then thought of. But, in the 
premonitions of coming danger before a persecu- 
tion breaks out, frankness gives way to prudence ; 
and the policy of the heretics changed when the 
people began to be "stirred up against them." 
Their Master shunned death so long as it could 
rightly be shunned ; and the peril of the time laid 
on those suspected of being Christians the duty of 
guarding every act, word, or look that might send 
a brother or sister to prison. 



ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 1 73 

Suddenly as the persecution may have come at 
last, it could not have taken the Twelve wholly by 
surprise. Their Master had forewarned them of evil 
times, brother delivering up brother to death, and 
the father the child. He had foretold St. Peter's 
violent death. Such warnings must have quickened 
their foresight ; and through private means of infor- 
mation, or through their own sagacity, the Disciples, 
no doubt, foreknew the coming of the persecution, 
and divined something of its secret purpose. 

Their foreknowledge of the troubles, that sooner 
or later were sure to come, must have deepened 
their conviction that the oral Gospel would not al- 
ways suffice for the wants of the Congregation ; and 
we shall prove that within the seven years after 
the Pentecost, St. Matthew either finished his Gos- 
pel, or that, when the persecution came, he did so at 
once. In seven years there had been time for him 
to plan and to think over his closely-reasoned and 
mighty argument. His Master gave him no such 
intimation of length of days as He did to his brother 
Evangelist, St. John, and the coming on of the per- 
secution warned him against delay. For safe-keep- 
ing, copies of his manuscript had to be sent out of 
the city. And St. Matthew felt, that when the 
scattered Congregation went every-where preach- 
ing the word, it was not enough for them to carry 
in their hearts the oral Gospel of the Twelve, but 
that they ought, also, to have the written apostolic 
Gospel. 

Thus far I have given my conclusions as to the 
meaning of the persecution in Jerusalem, drawn 



174 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

from its record in the Acts as compared with the 
Gospel of St. Matthew. I am now to present the 
evidence of their correctness, which I find in that 
Gospel. If some of the facts concerning the history 
of a new sect were not generally, and some were 
not known at all, to its enemies, a manuscript recit- 
ing its origin would contain very dangerous mate- 
rial at a time when many of the actors in the events 
it related were in a city where search was made for 
them, when spies were watching the gates, armed men 
were breaking into houses and trying all the divers 
means of detection, using in their turn fraud and 
force, imprudence, weakness, or treachery, to steal 
or wrench from their victims the names and hiding- 
places of other heretics. If such a manuscript were 
written out before the persecution came, common 
sense and common prudence would dictate that it 
should so be altered that it would not imperil any 
of the brotherhood and sisterhood. So far as pos- 
sible within the scope of its intent, all that was 
dangerous would be suppressed. Nothing would 
be left that needlessly implicated any one. It 
would bear the marks of having been so written or 
so altered, that, if an inquisitor tore one of its copies 
from the bosom of a martyr, or if, by accident or by 
treachery, one of them fell into his hands, it would 
not put him on the track of fresh victims. 

As many incidents of far-off time are unknown, 
just what names, places, and events might safely be 
mentioned in such an ancient manuscript at the 
time it was written, and just what dangerous facts 
or hints there must be in it, could not be ascertained 



ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL. 1 75 

beyond all caviling ; and yet, in such a manuscript, 
indisputable marks of caution would be manifest 
when they came to be looked for. It might take a 
microscope to see them all, but some of them 
would be deep-cut and plain. 

On such a manuscript its date would be stamped 
in more ways than one. And it would set forth 
some things so guardedly and briefly that other 
manuscripts, going over the same ground at a later 
time, might, here and there, seem to contradict it. 
If its true date, and, consequently, the knowledge 
of the circumstances in which it was sent forth, were 
forgotten, its peculiarities in this and in other ways 
might give rise to perplexity and wonder; and yet 
successive generations in whom the critical faculty 
was not awake might read such a manuscript with- 
out noting those marks, or at least without think- 
ing they had any special meaning — just as the great 
bird-tracks on the stones in the valley of the Con- 
necticut, always there and always as plainly visible 
as now, were passed unseen till our own day ; or, if 
seen, were only wondered at, and, so far from being 
made to give up their meaning, were not thought 
to have any meaning. 

St. Matthew's Gospel bears marks of having been 
written at the time of some general persecution ; 
and as the only general persecution of the Chris- 
tians in Judea was the one which began with the 
arrest of St. Stephen, it must have been written at 
that time ; or else (which I take to have been the 
case) changes were then made in the manuscript 
that fitted it to the circumstances. In St. Mat- 



iyd THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

thew's Gospel there are signs of general caution as 
to all whom its disclosures were likely to endanger, 
and signs of special caution for Lazarus and his 
sisters and for the Mother of our Lord. This will 
be proved from what St. Matthew does say and 
from what he does not say — from his handling of 
some facts, and from his silence as to others. But 
his silence as to the ministry of our Lord in Judea 
came from other causes, and will form no part of 
the argument ; nor will his treating so briefly of the 
Resurrection and his bringing his Gospel to an end 
without a word concerning the great events that 
soon followed in Jerusalem. In these things there 
may be confirmation of our argument, but to sepa- 
rate this out and to measure its force does not seem 
possible, and the case is strong enough without it. 
Herod the king, Herod the Tetrarch of Galilee, 
Philip his brother, and Herodias, Caiaphas the 
high-priest, and Pilate the Roman governor, John 
the Baptist, Joseph, and Mary the Mother of the 
Lord, are named by St. Matthew. " His brethren " 
— " James and Joses and Simon and Judas " — and 
" sisters " of his are spoken of, but the names of the 
latter are not given. He names the twelve chosen 
Disciples, also Simon the leper, Simon of Cyrene, 
Joseph of Arimathea, Mary the mother of James 
and Joses ; and he speaks of the mother of James 
and John as the mother of Zebedee's children. St. 
Mark names two others, Jairus the ruler of the 
synagogue in Capernaum, and Timseus the blind 
man of Jericho. St. Luke gives the names of the 
Caesars, Augustus and Tiberius ; of Lysanius the Te- 



NAMES IN THE GOSPELS. 1 77 

trach of Abilene, of Cyrenius the Governor of Syria, 
of Annas the high-priest ; also those of Zacharias 
and Elisabeth his wife, of Simeon and Anna, (four 
aged persons at the time of Christ's birth, who 
could not have been living at the time of his Minis- 
try.) He names Simon the Pharisee of Capernaum, 
Zaccheus of Jericho, Cleopas of Emmaus, Mary and 
her sister Martha, Susannah, and Joanna the wife 
of Chuza, Herod's steward. He also names Mat- 
thias and Justus, who " companied with the disci- 
ples all the time from the baptism of John." To 
the names given in the three earlier Gospels St. 
John adds those of Nicodemus, of Lazarus, and of 
Malchus, a servant of the high-priest. 

There are not many names in the Evangeliad. 
Had there been a legendary element in the Gospels 
there would have been more. For the Magi, tradi- 
tion invented names ; scholars conjecture some of 
those of the doctors in the Temple, and Claudia 
Procula, the name of Pilate's wife, seems to be re- 
membered. The Evangelists could have given more 
names — those of the seventy disciples, for example. 
They could have given some of those of the court 
that tried our Lord ; but their names have little 
more of true interest than those of the Roman sol- 
diers who watched the cross or who guarded the 
tomb. The Evangelists thought more of the char- 
acters of men than of their names ; and had they 
given the name of that blind beggar who answered 
the Jews so well, of the father whose child Christ 
healed when He came down from the Mount of 

Transfiguration, or of the two demoniacs, their 
12 



178 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

pictures would not have been more life-like. The 
title of the centurion naturally took the place of 
his name. Of the ten lepers only one returned to 
give thanks, but even his name is no more to us 
than the name of the Good Samaritan in the par- 
able. The names of the two false witnesses at the 
trial are well forgotten. Actions often live in the 
memory though the names of the actors were un- 
known. The disciples were moving about, and 
they may not have heard the names of the young 
ruler or of the Syrophcenician woman, or, if they 
did, may soon have forgotten them. 

But St. Matthew's avoidance of some events and 
his keeping back some names is not to be explained 
on general principles. Throughout his Gospel there 
is a cautious reticence; and, though it be not cer- 
tain that caution was the motive for his reserve or 
silence in each and every instance when it looks 
very much like it, yet, from all such cases taken to- 
gether, the inference of caution is certain. He de- 
liberately suppressed names and facts. 

The conclusive evidence of this is in the later 
chapters of St. Matthew, but his handling of events 
in the Ministry in Galilee suggests the idea of cau- 
tious regard for the safety of persons whom his dis- 
closures might endanger. Sometimes he tells what 
a person did and suppresses the name. Sometimes 
both name and fact are suppressed. He does not 
give the name of Jairus, the ruler of his own syna- 
gogue, and he says nothing of that nobleman of his 
own town of Capernaum, who, with all his house, 
believed. Is there not something here that looks 



CAUTION OF ST. MATTHEW. 1 79 

like caution? He does not mention Joanna, who 
ministered of her substance to the Lord, and whose 
home was in the neighboring town of Tiberias. 
May not this have been from caution ? The court 
of that Herod who murdered the Baptist was at 
Tiberias, and Chuza, Joanna's husband, was the 
steward of his household. Bartimaeus, the son of 
Timaeus, was in some way distinguished among the 
blind, who, after the manner of the East, sat in the 
gates of Jericho begging. St. Mark gives his name. 
St. Matthew leaves it out. Probably in that there 
is no significance, but there is significance in St. 
Matthew's silence as to Zaccheus. As he recalled 
the days when his Master stayed in Jericho, he could 
not have forgotten its publican, his eagerness to see 
the Lord, his climbing up into " the sycamore tree," 
the honor Christ gave him when He said, " I must 
abide at thy house." Surely Matthew could not 
have forgotten the feast the publican gave, so like 
his own ; yet, he left it to St. Luke to record the 
story and the name of Zaccheus. It is probable 
that the begging from Pilate, by Joseph of Arima- 
thea, of the body of Jesus, while it yet hung upon 
the accursed tree, (which is related by St. Matthew,) 
was too public for caution ; and it was safe to give 
the name of Simon, who was made to bear the cross, 
for he lived in distant Cyrene. But St. Matthew 
left it to be made known in a safer time that in 
the garden and at night Nicodemus embalmed 
the Crucified. He names two women, mothers of 
Disciples, and, if they were with their sons whose 
names are in his list of the Twelve, this may have 



ISO THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

had something to do with his naming those women. 
Zebedee, the husband of one of them, was living 
when our Lord's ministry began, but seems to have 
died before it ended. St. Matthew also names 
Mary Magdalene ; and Simon the leper, who had 
been afflicted with disease, and may have died be- 
fore St. Matthew wrote. 

Our argument yet needs one case where St. Mat- 
thew must have known a name, where he was called 
upon to give* that name, and where he suppressed it. 
There are two such cases ; and there is a third that 
is almost or quite such a case — the name of the 
man in whose house the Last Supper was instituted. 
Of the many who come and go in the Gospels, few 
enkindle more of sacred curiosity. Disciples were 
sent to meet a -man bearing a jar of water. They 
were to follow the water-canier home, and there to 
give this word from the Lord, " My time is at hand. 
I will eat the Passover at thy house. " This mes- 
sage — " My time is at hand " — recognizes, in the 
master of the house, a spiritual insight such as 
elsewhere appears but once in the Gospels ; and I 
remark, in passing, that his discipleship is not ex- 
plained by any thing in the earlier Gospels ; yet, 
strangely as the story there reads, it is in harmony 
with what the last Gospel alone tells of Christ's 
teachings and miracles in Jerusalem. 

St. Matthew kept back the name of that man so 
trusted, and so worthy of trust. St. Mark copied 
his example. His name may not have reached St. 
Paul, who was not in the "large upper chamber." 
Yet that name must have become well known to the 



CAUTION OF ST. MATTHEW. l8l 

Twelve in their sojourn in Jerusalem ; and, if St. 
Matthew wrote his name in his manuscript, he 
struck it out in that time of common danger, when, 
perhaps, some of the Twelve were concealed in that 
man's house. 

Those who, in spite of its organic unity, contend 
that St. Matthew's Gospel was made up of frag- 
mentary sayings, around which a frame-work of 
events was afterwards constructed, may plead that 
all the facts cited agree with their patch-work 
theory. Some of them do ; but the strength of our 
case is in the harmony of so many facts that there 
can be no reasonable doubt of the conclusion drawn 
from them collectively ; and, though a perfect knowl- 
edge of this cumulative evidence might set some of 
those facts aside, yet that larger knowledge might 
know of others to fill their places. St. Matthew's 
caution is quite certain from the evidence already 
given. But the evidence is not all in. The most 
decisive part of it is found in two facts, one proving 
special caution for the family of Bethany and the 
other for the Mother of our Lord. 

This generation, too much in the habit of reading 
the four Gospels as one continuous history, or, rath- 
er, too little in the habit of studying each of the 
Gospels by itself, was wonder-struck when infidels, 
searching them one by one and then comparing 
them, pointed out that the three earlier Evangelists 
seem to know very little of the family of Bethany, 
and nothing of Lazarus, whose calling by the Lord 
from the tomb now stirs the soul like a sound from 
the archangel's trumpet. Some were so bewildered 



1 82 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

that they felt compelled to ascribe to the Gospels a 
character that vacillates between history and tradi- 
tion ; and the reticence of St. Matthew as to that 
family, continued as it is by St. Mark and St. Luke, 
is indeed strange. Our Lord's affection for that 
family was well known to his Disciples, and nothing 
he ever did was better known in Jerusalem, and in 
all the region round about, than the raising of Laz- 
arus ; yet in St. Matthew's Gospel only one cold 
line alludes to the blessed home of Mary and her 
sister Martha : " He went out to Bethany and 
lodged there." St. Mark barely names Bethany, 
and says nothing of the family. St. Luke does not 
locate the home of Martha and Mary: with him it 
is " a certain village ;" and he does not say they 
were sisters of Lazarus. Like St. Matthew and like 
St. Mark, St. Luke does not name Lazarus at all. 

The danger which surrounded that family was 
the reason for this silence. St. Matthew sup- 
pressed the names of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, 
because the hatred of the Jews was such that no 
word could then be written of them, that, by any 
evil chance, might make their lives less secure. It 
may be that nothing could have made that hatred 
more intense or their danger greater; yet St. Mat- 
thew did as any careful man would have done. 
Written with quickening pulses of his heart, his 
brief, cold line was designedly brief and cold. Well 
he loved that family, and well he knew the worth 
of their history ; but he knew as well it would not 
be lost, for his colleague, St. John, would record it 
in a later and safer time. The silence of St. Mark 



DECISIVE MARK OF CAUTION. 1 83 

is to be explained in the same way ; or he may- 
have felt that he ought to take the same course 
that the Apostle had taken. In St. Luke's sketch 
of Mary and Martha a touch of contrast identifies 
their likenesses with their full portraits from the 
pencil of St. John ; but St. Luke tells so little of 
them, and that little is comparatively so unimpor- 
tant, that it looks as if St. Luke felt that he ought 
to show that the sisters were known to him, and 
had some reason for not saying more. 

The Christians in Judea were never safe, and a 
continuing deadly purpose of the Jews toward the 
family of Bethany would explain the continuance, 
through the second and third Gospel, of the silence 
of the first Gospel about them. There is a similar 
caution concerning the Blessed Mother in the first 
Gospel, that continues in the second, and ceases in 
the third, doubtless because the reason for it had 
ceased with her death. 

St. Matthew's withholding the name of the man 
in whose " upper chamber " our Lord kept the 
Passover, is good evidence of caution ; his with- 
holding another name is decisive evidence of it. It 
stamps upon his Gospel one mark of caution as to 
the family of Bethany that cannot be disputed. 
Our Lord himself commanded that a certain act of 
a woman of that family should be told forever as a 
memorial of her. And though it break in upon the 
continuity of our argument, let us pause, for here 
something may be learned of Christ, as a man, not 
elsewhere to be learned so well. At a feast in the 
house of Simon of Bethany, Mary, the sister of 



1 84 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Lazarus, moved by the prophetic intuition of faith 
and love, anointed the body of Jesus, his hands and 
his feet, for burial. With an insight into the Script- 
ures far beyond that of the disciples, she knew that 
the Lamb of God would atone by suffering unto 
death for the sins of his people. Her sister Mar- 
tha had the same high order of intellect. Jesus 
said unto her, " I am the resurrection and the life. 
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in 
me shall never die." Then — as if what the Christ 
had said was implied in what she was saying — Mar- 
tha answered, " Yea, Lord, I believe that Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into 
the world." 

Mary knew, what that Man of the house knew 
and the disciples did not know, that the time of 
the Master was at hand. The uncomprehending 
Disciples looked coldly on her anointing of Jesus as 
one who was dead ; but He who alone understands, 
who alone appreciates any one, understood and ap- 
proved. He felt that she appreciated his suffering 
that was to come, as though that suffering were in 
the past. Appreciation is as needful and grateful 
to the human soul as love, and is perhaps more 
rare. Our Lord had so little of appreciation that 
the loneliness of his life on earth passes all imagin- 
ing. His Disciples at last proved themselves wor- 
thy of his trust ; but then their faith was dark in 
the clear light of that woman's. She felt the 
shadow of fast-coming death that was falling on her 
Lord. She knew his human solicitude that his 



THE HUMAN FEELING OF OUR LORD. 1 85 

poor remains should be decently cared for, and 
from what he then said we know that he shared in 
that human feeling which dimly preintimates that 
the body will come again from the dust, — as in some 
far distant cycle it will, when Christ shall destroy 
the " last enemy," and, by the redemption of the 
body as well as of the soul, give divine complete- 
ness to His victory over death. That real human 
feeling belongs to all born of the Woman who heard 
the inexorable decree and the mysterious promise, 
that one of woman born would redeem from death ; 
and our Lord's solicitude for his remains proves his 
real human nature. But how could Mary have 
known that feeling ? She may have known it from 
the Scriptures, for there God, as if touched by this 
solicitude of his Son, ordains that his grave shall be 
with the rich in his death : — a decree that came to 
pass when his body was laid in that " new tomb in 
the rock, wherein never man was laid." 

How that wonderful woman knew that feeling of 
her Lord, or how her anointing of his living body 
had such significance, I do not fully comprehend, 
but she knew that his executioners would keep her 
away from him when he died. She was in sympa- 
thy with her Lord, and she heard his commenda- 
tion : " She hath done what she could. She is 
come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. 
She hath wrought a good work upon me. Why 
trouble ye the woman ? " This He said because the 
disciples " had indignation " when they saw " the 
waste " of that " costly offering." Judas murmured 
that " it might have been sold for more than three 



1 86 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

hundred pence and given to the poor;" as though 
there were only one poverty ; as though, in the lack 
of all that makes the wear of life easier, in the want 
of honor and of love, Jesus was not poorer than 
the poor. Judas, troubled for the poor, went out 
and sold his Master ! Jesus knew why Judas went, 
and yet he then foretold that his Gospel should be 
preached in all the world. 

But it is not his divine foresight, so often shown 
elsewhere, it is his human gratitude, that he rarely 
had occasion to show, that here claims our thoughts. 
The spirit in which he said, " He that shall give a 
cup of cold water to a disciple of mine, for my sake, 
shall in no wise lose his reward," here breaks forth 
as nowhere else in all his life. His affluence of 
gratitude shows his heart as. a man, and his bound- 
less reward is befitting him to whom all time, all 
space belonged. " Wheresoever this Gospel " — 
the Gospel, known to Mary, that his death would 
save his people — " wheresoever this Gospel shall be 
preached, in the whole world, there shall also this, 
which this woman hath done, be told as a memorial 
of her r 

With that command we resume our argument. 
In the act of obeying that command St. Matthew 
disobeyed it ; he told what that woman did, and 
kept back her name. It is evasive to say, that her 
intelligence, her sympathy, her faith, her love, were 
to be remembered ; that it is immaterial who she 
was, what name she bore. The command is plain, 
what that woman did shall be told as a memorial 
of her ; and St. Matthew, when telling what he felt 



THE NAME OF MARY. 187 

he must and did tell, must have had strong reasons 
for keeping back her name. 

It is folly here to allow the thought of fragment- 
ary tradition ; for, with pious zeal, tradition would 
have invented a hundred names for that woman, 
rather than have had her story go forth in this un- 
satisfactory way. Her name would have been seen 
in the clouds, whistled in the winds, whispered of 
angels ! There is the soberness of history in St. 
Matthew's silence ; and what can have been his 
reason save the caution which is shown throughout 
his Gospel, and is here specially manifest toward 
the family of Bethany ? 

St. Matthew twice points as straight to that 
family as prudence permitted. Once, when all but 
intimating that it was the custom of Jesus, he says, 
He went out to Bethany and lodged there ; once, 
when he locates what he told of that unnamed 
woman in the house of Simon of Bethany. This 
makes against my argument ; still, he may have 
felt constrained to say something that would tend 
to identify that woman in a better time ; and it is 
caution that is here to be proved, not its metes 
and bounds. 

That St. Matthew, having said all that he could 
consistently with that woman's safety, left what he 
could not say to his colleague St. John, is curiously 
confirmed by the way that St. John brings in her 
name. St. Mark had told the story, and, like St. 
Matthew, had suppressed the name. St. John re- 
peats the story twice told before, and, as if quick to 
supply the omissions of his brother Evangelists and 



1 88 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

do what they expected, he gives her name the first 
possible chance, before he tells her story in its 
proper place farther on. And it looks very much 
as if he had in mind St. Luke's unnamed " village " 
when he writes thus : u Now a certain man was sick 
named Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and 
her sister Martha!' Then he at once goes on to 
say : " // was that Mary which anointed the Lord 
with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, 
whose brother Lazarus was sick." St. John's ready 
way of referring, beforehand, to the story of Mary, 
also shows that the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. 
Mark were well known to his readers ; and he could 
safely name Mary and Martha and Lazarus, for he 
had long outlived them all. 

The caution of St. Matthew for the safety of the 
Blessed Mother remains to be proved. This led to 
a peculiar presentation of some facts and an omis- 
sion of others, that give to his Gospel, at certain 
points, a fragmentary appearance which heretofore 
has baffled the critical sagacity that has tried to ex- 
plain it. The reason for these enigmas is St. Mat- 
thew's caution, which also vindicates his Gospel 
from any seeming want of honor for her " whom 
all nations are to call blessed." 

Concerning the Blessed Mother there is a myste- 
rious reserve and silence in the two earlier Gospels. 
We are astonished at the absence of so much of 
the glory and grace that shine around her in the 
third Gospel. It is true, that St. Matthew marks 
that her faith led to th i worship of her divine Son 
by the pilgrims from the Far-East, and this, with 



RESERVE AS TO THE HOLY VIRGIN. 1 89 

what he records in his first chapter, is enough to 
show, that, in honoring her, the first Gospel is in 
harmony with the third; and still, its mysterious 
reserve and silence remain. 

This lessens not the perfection of the written 
Gospel, for all the Gospels were to be together, and 
the congregation was to form its idea of the holy 
Virgin from them all ; and yet this does not explain 
the reserve of the earliest Gospel. It refers to her 
but four times : once when the angel told St. Jo- 
seph that the child of the Virgin would save His 
people from their sins; once, when at Bethlehem 
the Magi worshiped the Child ; once, in the minis- 
try of Jesus, when she stands outside of the circle 
around her Son ; and once, as living among the 
Nazarenes. The two last allusions show that she 
was living at the time of the ministry of her Son ; 
but that may have been well known to the Jews, 
and St. Matthew may have thought that it should 
be known to all, that more ready credence might 
be given to revelations of hers that would be made 
at a later time. 

St. Mark's Gospel has only those two later allu- 
sions; and it is startling to find that her name could 
not be known from his Gospel were it not for the 
taunt of the Nazarenes, " Is not this the carpenter, 
the son of Mary ? " In the third Gospel there is a 
great change. The reserve of St. Matthew and St. 
Mark is there ended by an evangel that came -from 
the Blessed Mother herself. In the last Gospel she 
is at the marriage-feast, where her faith led to the 
first miracle, and she is near the cross, when our 



190 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

dying Lord intrusted her to the care of his beloved 
Disciple. 

It seems unreal that any wrong could have come 
near the Mother of the Lord ; yet so full of evil was 
the time that she must have been in danger from 
the wrath of man so long as she lived. The Satanic 
purpose to crucify her Son did enter into the souls 
of wicked men ; and, though it seems too wicked to 
think of, yet, when their hatred of Christ broke out 
anew in the murder of St. Stephen, the course of 
events in that persecution and the caution as to any 
thing that might, by any chance, endanger her safety, 
point to a purpose of the Jews to find the Mother 
of Jesus, to try her on the charge of blasphemously 
conspiring with her Son, and, as they murdered 
Him, to murder her through the violated forms of 
law, and thus to put an end to heresy. 

For all St. Matthew's caution, strange as it may 
seem, there was, then, as strange a reason. This 
caution agrees with his seemingly casual allusion 
tq the birth of Jesus in the first verse of his second 
chapter ; this caution opens the way for an explana- 
tion of the seeming variance between him and St. 
Luke as to the home of the holy family, and also 
of his proving the Messianic ancestry of Jesus 
through St. Joseph's genealogy ; but such are the 
intricacies of those questions, and they involve so 
much that belongs to them only, that their answers 
must be put off until our next chapter. And, though 
still leaving some further evidence of it to come out 
in the discussion of those questions, we here finish 
our argument with one decisive fact. 



CARE FOR THE HOLY VIRGIN. 191 

As at the close of our proof of St. Matthew's 
caution for the family of Bethany, so here, at the 
close of our proof of his caution for the Blessed 
Mother, one fact clinches the case. With the Dis- 
ciple whom Jesus loved She stood near the cross ; 
Jesus said to his Mother, " Woman, behold thy 
son;" and, from that hour, that Disciple took her 
unto his own home. This must have been well 
known to all the Twelve, to St. Matthew with the 
rest, and his not speaking of it is proof, not of silence 
merely, but of secrecy. This is clear on comparing 
his Gospel with that of St. John. " Many women," 
who followed Jesus from Galilee, beheld the cruci- 
fixion. When St. Matthew speaks of them they 
were gazing afar off. Some of them afterward sep- 
arated from the others ; for St. John speaks of some 
women as near the cross, and evidently he speaks 
of a group that came from the company of " many 
women," spoken of by St. Matthew ; for each Evan- 
gelist singles out some of the most noteworthy of 
those women, and the name of Mary Magdalene is 
in both lists. Now, from the names so honored, 
St. Matthew leaves out that of the Blessed Mother, 
yet he must have known that she was one of the 
company of women whose presence he commemo- 
rates, and three of whom he names. He was silent 
as to her being there, because he wrote with due re- 
gard to her safety, when persecution, raging against 
those who believed in the divine Son, raged most 
fiercely against the Blessed Mother, who was then, 
no doubt, with St. John in Jerusalem. 

When our Lord, thoughtful, in death, for His 



192 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Mother, intrusted her to the care of St. John, He 
may have foreseen that the Jews would seek to 
compass her death as they had His own, and that 
she would be safer away from her kindred. This is 
possible, though we would not weaken our argu- 
ment by laying stress upon it. But, surely, in that 
evil time, the Twelve were always solicitous for her 
safety. And when persecution was drawing nigh, 
and St. Matthew saw the need of prudence, his care 
for her, naturally and inevitably, gave a peculiar 
turn to what he wrote. Some things, that he could 
not omit, he wrote in a peculiar way, and he was 
silent as to others, of which, in other circumstances, 
he would have spoken. Thus passes away all sem- 
blance of any difference in their tone between the 
first two Gospels and the third, when speaking of 
the Blessed Mother — a semblance more painful to 
thoughtful souls than the semblance of any histor- 
ical differences. 

In conclusion, one statement sums up the case. 
Had there been a trial of the Blessed Mother on the 
charge of being the accomplice of her Son in the 
crime of blasphemy, and had St. Matthew's Gospel 
been produced on that trial, no evidence could have 
been found in it to sustain that indictment. So far 
as could be known from his Gospel, She was away 
from the place of crucifixion. In it She is never 
openly engaged in aiding in his ministry. The Gos- 
pel is full of proof that Christ Jesus was the Son 
of God, but its direct testimony of this is his own 
affirmation on his trial, the witness from heaven, and 
the words of the angel to St. Joseph. 



THE LATER TIME-MARK. 1 93 

Internal Evidence thus proves the date of 
St. Matthew's Gospel ; and yet, in that Gospel, a 
time-mark is twice repeated that seems to disprove 
that evidence. With the thirty pieces of silver the 
priests bought the potter's field — " Wherefore that 
field was called the field of blood, unto this day." 
Again : they bribed the Roman watch set over the 
sepulcher, to say, " His disciples came by night, and 
stole him away while we slept. . . . And this saying 
is commonly reported among the Jews until this 
day." The words, " until this day" were written 
later than the martyrdom of St. Stephen. But 
there is a limit to the time in the fall of Jerusalem, 
some thirty-seven years after the crucifixion. It 
might have been written at the end of those years 
or of half of them,* for time seems longer or short- 
er in proportion to its events, and those years were 
years of change. 

Writing as early as the seventh year after the 
crucifixion, and primarily for Jews of Palestine, St. 
Matthew wrote, as St. Paul spoke to them, in their 
native tongue. But when the world became the 

* I quote this from a Review of a book on " The Second French 
Empire" in one of our journals, as apt confirmation of what is said 
above: — "When we contrast the condition of Europe of to-day — 
the unity of Italy, the rise of the German Empire, the passive and 
pacific position of the French Republic — with the dreams and hopes 
and aims and schemes of the Bonaparte dynasty seventeen years ago, 
we can hardly help feeling as if we were reading a history of the Mid- 
dle Ages. Every thing seems so changed. It all seems so long ago." 

For the same reason this sentence is quoted from another writer : — 
"I am about to speak of Ireland as it was some four and twenty 
years ago, and feel as if I were referring to a long past period of his- 
tory, such have been the changes, political and social, effected in 
that interval." 
13 



194 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

field of Christianity, there was urgent reason why 
St. Matthew should turn his Hebrew Gospel into 
Greek — as he could in a few days. His Hebrew 
Gospel, if rendered into Greek, could be read in 
Palestine, and be read every-where. 

Scholars are well agreed that our Greek Gospel 
of St. Matthew is not a translation. In the second 
century the Syriac version was made from it, and 
the Syriac language is so like the later Hebrew 
that the Syriac translators would have followed St. 
Matthew's Hebrew text, had they not been sure 
that he also wrote the Greek text they translated. 
A translation would never have been received as of 
the same authority with an original Gospel had it 
not been accredited by something so remarkable as 
to be well remembered. If our Gospel of St. Mat- 
thew were a translation it would be known who 
made it, and the place, time, and circumstances ; 
but even tradition does not claim to know any of 
these things. 

Such were the circumstances in which the few 
copies of St. Matthew's Hebrew Gospel were sent 
forth, and such the calamities that bereft Palestine 
of its Jewish inhabitants, that it is not strange that 
its few copies early disappeared. Only Palestinian 
Jews could read it, and, even with them, when away 
from Palestine, St. Matthew's Greek Gospel took 
its place. 

Confusion and uncertainty would have followed, 
had St. Matthew altered his Gospel when he turned 
it into Greek, and there is no probability that he 
ever thought of it. Still he might have naturally 



CONCLUSION. 195 

inserted the words, " until this day," when speak- 
ing of the Potter's Field, and of the story told by 
the Jews. That story touched him deeply, for he 
relates the facts with a fullness unlike his usual 
brevity ; and the space he gives them seems almost 
too great when we think of other things which he 
might have given in their stead. To St. Matthew 
it was an old story then, for in thought and feeling 
he was even then far from the time when his Mas- 
ter's body lay in the tomb ; yet when, some years 
later, he turned his Hebrew Gospel into Greek, the 
Jews were still circulating the old calumny which 
he exposed seven years after its fabrication. And 
if, as we may easily imagine, something brought 
this sharply home to him as he was writing, he 
may then, in wonder and in sorrow, have said that 
little ; and it was like St. Matthew to say no more. 
Our conclusion, then, is this : After St. Matthew 
wrote his Gospel in his native tongue he turned 
that Hebrew Gospel into that Greek dialect which 
his brethren used in their writings, and those words 
which we have considered merely show that this 
was done some years after he wrote the Gospel in 
the Hebrew tongue. 



I96 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE GENEALOGY IN ST. MATTHEW. 

tHE discovery verified in the last chapter throws 
some light upon St. Matthew's proving the 
Messianic ancestry of Jesus by the genealogy 
of Joseph, and upon alleged variances between St. 
Luke and the first two chapters of St. Matthew. 
Heretofore, their defense has hardly gone beyond 
saying that St. Luke does not absolutely contradict 
any thing that is said in them, yet no two chapters 
in the holy Gospels are denied with more strength 
of conviction. Some critics say they are made up 
of three disconnected fragments ; that, by its own 
showing, the genealogy has nothing to do with 
Jesus, and was stupidly prefixed to the second 
fragment. They say the last fragment (the second 
chapter) is a jumble of astrology and fable ; and 
Norton, one of the most judicious of such critics, 
threw those two chapters aside, and began his 
translation of the Gospels with the third chapter 
of St. Matthew. 

Elsewhere I have defended the second chapter 
of St. Matthew by explaining it ; and I am now to 
try to do the like with his use of the genealogy of 
St. Joseph. The New Testament is the comple- 
tion of the Old. The Old Testament foretold that 



THE GENEALOGY. 1 97 

the Messiah would be the Son of David, the Son of 
Abraham, and the first apostolic record of Christ 
Jesus could not pass over his Messianic lineage ; 
nor could St. Matthew have left this out unless he 
changed the whole plan of his Gospel. For it was 
one of his purposes to prove that the prophets of 
God so prophesied of the Son of God that the old 
revelation was fulfilled in the new. It was not so 
with the second Gospel. St. Mark says nothing of 
the Messianic ancestry of Jesus, and little of Mes- 
sianic prophecy, but St. Mark wrote after St. Mat- 
thew, and there is no presumption, from his silence, 
that each was not an indispensable part of the ear- 
liest-written Gospel ; for St. Mark's Gospel was not 
to go forth independently of St. Matthew's, and 
the two Gospels made the circuit of the world to- 
gether. 

Josephus, who was a man grown when St. Mat- 
thew was an old man, says that " he set down his 
genealogy as he found it in the public records," 
and St. Matthew offers such a table. In courts of 
law a family record is evidence of descent, and the 
table offered by St. Matthew combines the weight 
of a family record and a public record. He gives 
the proper evidence in good legal form. 

A genealogical table, reaching through many 
generations, would be likely to have some inaccura- 
cies ; but if they do not touch the points to be 
proved, nor raise any suspicion of fraud, they rather 
strengthen its evidence by showing it to be an hon- 
est old record, and not one gotten up for the occa- 
sion. Such inaccuracies, if such there be, would 



I98 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

not make against the inspiration of St. Matthew's 
Gospel. His inspiration vouches only that " the 
Book of the Generation of Jesus " proves his de- 
scent from David and Abraham. Thus far his in- 
spired witness to its accuracy goes, and there was 
no need that it should go any farther. He had to 
quote the table as he found it ; if there were any 
such inaccuracies, and he had corrected them, he 
would have tampered with the evidence. 

Still he might, perhaps, have made some changes 
not meant to give it any weight that did not belong 
to it as an old, legal, Jewish genealogy — changes 
that did not vitally affect its evidence — and it looks 
as if he did. For surely in such documents it was 
not usual to give the names of women ; yet the 
Evangelist names Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, and 
speaks of her that had been the wife of Urias. 
Thus he marks, that Jesus, though of blessed and 
kingly ancestry, was associated in his lineage, as in 
his life, with sinners ; and though Ruth be of pure 
and gentle memory, yet she was of the Moabites, 
whom an old law shut out of the congregation of 
Israel. So that even into that dry genealogical 
catalogue of names the Evangelist interweaves in- 
timations that the mercy in Christ will reach to sin- 
ners and to Gentiles. This St. Matthew did in the 
same spirit in which he told of the coming and 
worship of the Magi, and these "disconnected frag- 
ments " bear the impress of the same heart and the 
same mind. 

In his seventeenth verse he points out three 
periods in the table, each ending with a person or 



THE SEVENTEENTH VERSE. 1 99 

an event easily remembered, and he may have had 
in mind that his manuscript would sometimes be 
committed to memory. But, surely, this cannot 
be the exhaustive reason for the verse ; it is a su- 
perficial and unsatisfactory reason for a word of 
inspiration. According to the Evangelist, the time- 
cycles of the Hebrews (and if so, the time-cycles of 
the world) had relations to the coming of the Lord. 
He points out that the life of the Hebrews unrolled 
in three time-harmonies, one ending in triumph, 
one in mourning; and thus may intimate that in 
the end of the third the notes of the two former 
blend. This remarkable verse, then, may reveal 
that as the visible world was framed in harmony 
with numbers, so the world's life unrolls in har- 
mony with time-laws ; and it may be the germ of 
a science yet to try the powers of man, quickened 
by mysterious sayings of the Sacred Oracles, to di- 
vine time-laws yet unknown. But the verse gives 
little help in discerning those laws beyond disclos- 
ing their existence, for some generations are stricken 
out of the table, manifestly for their sins. In the 
thought of God those unnumbered generations 
seem, in some respects, to have become as if they 
had never been. And so, for this world at least, 
those truths whose existence this difficult verse in- 
timates, would hardly seem to pertain to the 
thoughts of man, but only to the thought of GOD 
" whose glory it is to conceal a thing." 

St. Matthew proves the ancestry of Jesus by that 
of Joseph, and, until we understand how his evi- 
dence applies, it seems not only to be irrelevant, 



200 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

but to make what he relates self-contradictory. For 
he reveals that Jesus was born of the holy Virgin. 
How, then, can Joseph's genealogy have any thing 
to do with Jesus? And why did not St. Matthew 
prove his Davidian lineage through his Mother? 

Some answer these questions by saying that Jesus 
was the adopted son of Joseph ! And skeptics say 
that the placing the genealogy where it is, is evi- 
dence that St. Matthew's Gospel is a hap-hazard of 
traditions. Yet, as usual, they refute themselves ; 
for, if what they say be true, an idiot put the gen- 
ealogy where it is. And it can be shown that the 
genealogy of Joseph is evidence of the lineage of the 
Child of the holy Virgin. 

Much archseologic and historic knowledge con- 
cerning the Hebrews has perished. Much was bur- 
ied in the deluge of their calamities. Christianity 
went forth out of Judea, dwelt in other lands, spoke 
new languages, was busy with new duties, and forgot 
somewhat of the Hebrew past from which she was 
so widely separated. It is providential that so 
much biblical knowledge of Jewish origin yet throws 
light upon the writings of the Evangelists. In each 
generation something is added to our knowledge of 
their meaning. New searching for lost treasure finds 
some treasure overlooked before : a manuscript in 
the monastery of some far-off promontory or sacred 
mountain, or among some decivilized sect ; a sen- 
tence in some half-forgotten scribe, a name on a 
crumbling arch, a picture in a tomb, or a custom 
kept up by the children of the desert. The ocean 
rolls pieces of the wreck on shore, a leaf floats to 



THE GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 201 

the strand, a coin is washed up by the waves. Each 
year something is given up by the sea. 

There is another way in which that knowledge 
slowly and surely increases. Many minds turn to a 
truth whose defense and illustration require the dis- 
covery of some lost truth. The search from what is 
but a seeming truth to an unknown truth is apt to 
lead from error to error without end ; but the search 
from a known truth to an unknown truth is a hope- 
ful search. The one truth is the complement of the 
other. The known truth hints of the unknown 
truth, and there are nice fittings in of the one to the 
other that are never seen till the two are brought 
together. When a false discovery is made, however 
satisfactory it may be for a time, it will not continue 
satisfactory ; but whenever a true discovery is made 
it will more and more approve itself to be a true dis- 
covery. When the right conjecture hits upon the 
truth unthought of coincidences and relations with 
other truths then disclose themselves, and some 
historic evidence, before unnoted, is often seen to 
confirm it. A cheering book might be compiled 
of archaeological, historical, and critical conjectures 
concerning difficult verses of Scripture, and of theo- 
logical conjectures as well, that, for a time, seemed to 
have some life in them, but at length were buried 
out of sight and forgotten, while at last came the 
right conjecture with the vitality of truth, and lived 
on. Half truths — there are many such — some- 
times hinder the way of the truth, sometimes help 
toward it. Oftentimes a slight touch frees some of 
these half-truths from the quality of error, and some, 



202 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

by gaining that which they lacked, become whole 
truths. Thus the interpretation of holy Scripture 
grows more perfect ; and we cannot foreknow how 
much may yet be added to sacred knowledge of his- 
torical or critical truth, nor tell how much of moral 
and spiritual truth may yet brighten from out of the 
unimaginable depths of the brightness of God's 
holy word. 

St. Matthew thought the genealogy of Joseph, in 
connection with some other facts, was fitting evi- 
dence of the Messianic ancestry of Christ Jesus, 
and, whatever the difficulty of understanding his 
method of proof to us, who are so far from the old 
Oriental and Hebrew world, he puts it forward so 
readily that in his time there could have been no 
difficulty about it. 

His genealogical document runs straight down 
from Abraham to Joseph, and there ends without 
naming Jesus. This document, though incorporated 
into, and becoming part of, an historical statement 
which avers that Jesus was no son of Joseph, is said 
to be "The Book of the Generation of Jesus." Here, 
then, its genealogical value must be unique, and its 
superscription, heading, or title, " The Book of the 
Generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the 
Son of Abraham," is of special significance. 

The document is the book of the generation of Jo- 
seph. In and of itself, it is nothing else. So much 
is clear on its face. But its superscription alters its 
character so that, while originally it was "The Book 
of the Generation of Joseph," it somehow becomes, 
in its place here, according to its heading or title, 



THE GENEALOGY. 203 

" The Book of the Generation of Jesus" and here it 
proves that one of the two persons named in its 
heading was the national, and the other was the 
family, ancestor of Jesus. The question then is, 
How can the genealogy of Joseph prove these facts 
concerning Jesus? This we are to learn from these 
four statements which St. Matthew puts, side by 
side, on the same page : That Jesus was of the line 
of David, that He was the child of the Virgin, that 
Joseph was betrothed to the Virgin, and that Jo- 
seph was of the line of David. To St. Matthew the 
last three of those facts, as by him connected, were 
satisfactory evidence of the first — that Jesus was of 
David's line ; and he left that as proved. 

Now, it is clear from what he says, that the de- 
scent of Jesus from David cannot have been through 
Joseph. It can only have been through the blessed 
Virgin. And St. Matthew's proof, by the genealogy 
of Joseph, that Jesus was of David's line, evidently 
turns on the betrothment and marriage of the holy 
Virgin to a prince of the house of David. What, 
then, we further seek to know is this : How does the 
marriage of Mary with a descendant of David prove 
Mary herself to be a descendant of David ? 

The royal house of David never could have ceased 
to be of interest to the Jews. They had become 
very humble, but could not have been forgotten. It 
is said that at a later time search was made, by order 
of the Emperor Domitian, for some of them, and 
they were found in so low an estate that they were 
left unharmed. And such being their condition, 
that it had become the custom of the family of the 



204 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

great king to marry only among themselves, and 
that this was known to the Jews, are hardly less 
than certain. Royal blood intermarries with royal 
blood. When Victoria was betrothed to Albert 
every one knew that Albert was a prince, and every 
one would know that the betrothed of a Czarovitch 
or of a Prince of Wales was a princess. The family 
of King David, obscure people for centuries, must 
have married below their rank, or have intermarried 
among themselves. That they did the latter is so 
probable, from the tendency of Jewish families to 
keep together and from the usage of royal families, 
that it may be held for certain that when St. Mat- 
thew stated that Joseph, a prince of the house of 
David, married Mary, he plainly told his country- 
men (and, if he thought of others, he thought that 
through them all would know) that the betrothed 
of this prince was a princess of the house of David. 

The Evangelist was not called upon to mention 
the Davidian lineage of Joseph for its own sake. 
If that fact had relation to Joseph only, to have 
mentioned it would hardly have been in keeping 
with the simplicity of a Gospel. The Evangelist 
was called upon to mark the Davidian lineage of the 
holy Virgin. In his Gospel the fact was a vital one ; 
but if it be not implied in what he says of her husband, 
he did not mention it. Nay more, it is hardly too 
much to say, that unless he thought that the mar- 
riage of the Virgin proved that she also was of the 
royal family, by pointedly naming only the Davidian 
lineage of Joseph he denied that of the Virgin. 

The millions of the tribe of Sheikh Abraham kept 



GENEALOGICAL USAGE. 205 

the tradition of its blood with a fidelity beyond even 
that of the unchanging memory of the desert. It 
expanded a unique and wonderful system of gene- 
alogical notation, by means of which every one of 
that race could trace the lines of life, that met in 
himself, back to where they began in the common 
ancestor. In such a system there may have been 
usages that helped to make St. Matthew's use of 
the genealogy of Joseph very plain to Jews. Cer- 
tainly there seems to have been one such usage ; 
for the Mosaic code provided that " every daughter 
that possessed any inheritance in any tribe of the 
children of Israel should be wife unto the family of 
the tribe of her father." The mode of proving the 
flowing down of the blood of the ancestor was im- 
material, and as genealogies of women were little 
in use, it is probable that the lineage of such women 
was proved by that of the man they married. The 
Jews, then, were familiar with a class of women in 
which the wife had the same ancestor with her hus- 
band, and when St. Matthew proved the descent of 
the Child of the Virgin by the genealogy of the 
man she married, no doubt he proved this in a 
not uncommon fashion. And though, in this case, 
there was a limitation within a tribe, the Jews 
would understand this more specific limitation from 
the well-known usage of those of royal blood to in- 
termarry with those of royal blood, and from the 
custom of the house of David. 

To all this St. Matthew may fairly be regarded 
as a witness. To illustrate this, let it be supposed 
that the lost historical books of Justus of Tiberias, 



206 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

a contemporary of St. Matthew, had been pre- 
served, and that in them it was said that the son of 
a widow was of the blood of Mattathias of Modin, 
the founder of the royal Asmonean house ; that the 
widowed mother of that boy married Simon ; and 
that, to prove this Mattathias was the family ances- 
tor of her son, Justus brought forward " The Book 
of the Generation of Simon," and proved that Simon 
was of the heroic, kingly line of the Maccabees. 
The use of such a mode of proof by a Jewish histo- 
rian would make it clear that it was the well-known 
usage of the Asmoneans to intermarry only with 
their own family, and that the descent of the As- 
monean women from Mattathias was proved by the 
genealogies of their husbands. Justin's method 
would be evidence of this, and, with our imperfect 
knowledge of Hebrew archaeology, would be held to 
prove it in secular history. St. Matthew's mode of 
proving the lineage of Jesus should be treated in the 
same way. It is evidence offered by a Hebrew who 
evidently proceeds according to usage well estab- 
lished and well understood. 

The conclusion thus reached is, I think, upheld 
by the Gospel of the infancy as given by St. Luke, 
a great part of which is unquestionably of Hebraic 
origin, and, as I believe, is the gift of the holy Vir- 
gin. There it is written : " The angel Gabriel was 
sent from God to Nazareth, a city of Galilee, to a 
Virgin, espoused to a man whose name was Joseph 
of the House of David, and the Virgin's name was 
Mary." Here Joseph is brought in because of his 
betrothment, and the mention of his lineage (though 



THE GENEALOGY. 207 

natural) as in St. Matthew is not strictly in place, 
unless his lineage implies that of his betrothed. 
Again, it is written : " Joseph went up to the city 
of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was 
of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with 
Mary, his espoused wife." It would have been so 
natural to say, " Joseph went up to be taxed 
with Mary his espoused wife, because they were of 
the house and lineage of David," that the language 
carries with it the idea that the Davidian lineage of 
the wife was thought to be clear from that of her 
husband. Unless it be thus named by implication, 
it is nowhere named in this part of the third Gos- 
pel. St. Luke, in a genealogy supplementary to the 
one given by St. Matthew, brings legal evidence, 
from the public registries, that the blessed Virgin 
was of the house of David ; but this table comes 
after the Gospel of the infancy, and the fact that 
Joseph is there twice entitled, in connection with 
the blessed Virgin, prince of the house of David, 
without, in either case, its being said that she was a 
princess of the same house, is evidence that St. Mat- 
thew's mode of proving her lineage is explained by 
a custom of the family of David to marry only 
among themselves. And as St. Luke was a Greek, 
this justifies St. Matthew's leaving his Gospel at 
this point as he wrote it in Hebrew, and not chang- 
ing it when he sent it forth in Greek to all nations. 
It is said there were no genealogies of Hebrew 
women ; be that as it may, in so remarkable a case, 
St. Matthew might naturally have given that of the 
holy Virgin ; for he could have gotten her father's 



208 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

genealogy, which was hers, from the registers, as 
easily as any one's. But then St. Matthew would 
have represented a woman of David's family as 
marrying a man not of that family; yet, as a word 
could have set that right, this only shows how full 
St. Matthew's statement really is on every point. 
Certainly its form is peculiar, and yet, it is a com- 
plete, compact, national statement. 

Every way it can be explained : but the decisive 
reason for its peculiarity was St. Matthew's care for 
the safety of the Blessed Mother. The peril of the 
time made him extremely cautious. He had to say 
what he must say of her in such a way as to do no 
harm. St. Joseph's genealogy threw the light that 
had to be thrown upon her ancestors, and no more. 
All that inquisitors could extort from his table was 
the name of Joseph, the names of his ancestors, and 
that Mary was the name of the holy Virgin. Joseph 
had long been dead, and his genealogy imperiled 
few or none. But with the genealogy of the Blessed 
Mother it was somewhat different. And St. Mat- 
thew gave that proof of the lineage of Jesus which 
he had to give, in the way that would do the least 
possible harm to her and to her kindred. 



THE GOSPEL OF THE INFANCY. 209 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE GOSPEL OF THE INFANCY. 

N comparing the story of the Infancy in St. 
Matthew's Gospel with that in St. Luke's, 
skeptics say, that each Gospel follows a tradi- 
tion of its own. They say, that St. Matthew knows 
nothing of St. Luke's reason for the journey of the 
Virgin to Bethlehem ; that with him Bethlehem is 
the home of the Holy Family, for Jesus is born 
there ; that the coming of the star-led Magi to the 
village is told without a hint that the family lived 
elsewhere ; that when Joseph and Mary came up 
out of Egypt they are going back to their home in 
Bethlehem ; and not until they are told to go to 
Nazareth, a village of which they may never have 
heard, do they think of living there. 

In St. Luke, they say, there is quite another 
story. The home of Joseph and Mary is at Naza- 
reth. There they are betrothed, there they are 
married. A reason for their journey to Bethlehem 
is given. The holy Child is presented in the Tem- 
ple, and after the usual rites are over, Joseph and 
Mary, as quietly as they came, go back to their 
house and home in Nazareth. Of the Wise Men 
and the star, of the flight, of the massacre, St. Luke 

knows nothing; and he is equally ignorant of the 
14 



210 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

command to Joseph and Mary to hide in distant 
Nazareth. The parts of the evidence of this seem- 
ing variance fit nicely to each other ; and I know 
of nothing of its kind that is stronger. 

And here let us mark the importance of the tes 
timony of the ever-existing Congregation to the 
order in which the Gospels were written. Thos& 
orthodox critics, who have suffered themselves to 
be drawn into conjectures opposed to that testi- 
mony, imperil the defense of the Gospels they wish 
to aid, but whose conditions they do not under- 
stand. For the defense of those two Gospels here 
rests upon their time-order as it has ever been 
known. And St. Luke's course is of itself good 
evidence that he wrote after St. Matthew, and that 
St. Matthew's Gospel was known to the whole Con- 
gregation ; for, evidently, St. Luke was silent as to 
the flight into Egypt and all that went with it, be- 
cause he needed not to add one word to w T hat St. 
Matthew had written. 

And strange as St. Luke's silence would be in a 
like case in a modern writer, who would, at least, so 
allude to what was written before as to show his 
knowledge of it, an ancient writer might have done 
as St. Luke did. It is not more strange than the 
passing over of the Ministry in Judea by all the 
three earlier Evangelists without a word of their 
own, to show that there ever was any such. And 
here, as usual, the criticism of unbelief ends in diffi- 
culty greater than the difficulty it rejoices in thinking 
it has found ; for it is utterly unable to explain the 
silence, not only of St. Luke, but also of the other 



WHY ST. MATTHEW WROTE AS HE DID. 211 

Evangelists, concerning the coming of the Magi 
and the flight into Egypt. 

But still there is need to consider St. Matthew's 
omission to state that Nazareth was, and that 
Bethlehem was not, the home of the Virgin before 
the birth of the holy Child. For the home of a 
mother is likely to be where her child is born, and 
usually may be inferred from it. But the guarded 
silence or reserve of St. Matthew concerning all 
that might touch the safety of the Blessed Mother 
or of her kindred, shaped some things that he wrote ; 
and thus it may have been that he made only this 
mention of the birth of the Lord : " Now when 
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, . . . there 
came wise men from the East." The inference from 
this verse, that St. Matthew took Bethlehem to be 
the home of the Holy Family, would have been 
stronger were it not that in such a passing allusion 
to the birth of Jesus nothing could have been said 
of their home. But with some show of reason 
skeptics insist, that this would have come in, nat- 
urally, in the course of the chapter ; and that, with 
what is told of the return from Egypt, the infer- 
ence drawn from the whole narrative that Beth- 
lehem was the home, is as certain as that St. Luke 
says, it never was at Bethlehem and always was at 
Nazareth. And it is only by gaining some insight 
into why St. Matthew wrote as he did, and by 
marking just what he did say and what he did not 
say, that it can be made clear that his Gospel and 
that of St. Luke are not at variance. 

Though on reading the earliest Gospel only, we 



212 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

suppose that Bethlehem was the home of the Holy 
Family, that from Egypt they meant to go back 
there, and had not lived in Nazareth ; yet, when we 
learn from St. Luke how those things were, and 
then look more closely, we see that what we took 
to have been the facts were only probabilities, were 
conclusions of ours, not statements of St. Matthew. 
The facts were these. The Holy Family did not 
sojourn long in the land of the Nile, for vengeance 
hurried fast on the footprints of crime. Very soon 
Herod and Antipater, " they who had sought the 
young Child's life," (for such is the historic signifi- 
cance of the plural the angel used,) both died mis- 
erably, the son slain a few days before his father's 
death and by his father's command. Then the 
angel told St. Joseph to go into the land of Israel. 
After that the angel told him to go into Galilee. 
He went there ; and he dwelt in Nazareth. 

In holy Scripture the words of the angels prove 
themselves to be supernatural words by the fullness, 
the depth, and height of meaning they express in 
a small compass. What fullness in the brief anthem 
at the nativity ! " Glory to God in the highest ! 
On earth peace and good-will to man ! " How great 
the thought, how few the words ! The words of the 
angels are always few. In precision and brevity 
their speech compares with the speech of men as 
the wording of a telegram with that of a letter, and 
hence there is need to mark what they do not say 
as well as what they do say. When St. Joseph 
came up out of Egypt the angel did not tell him to 
go to Bethlehem, but to go into the land of Israel. 



THE PURPOSE OF ST. JOSEPH. 213 

From the next verses we learn that Joseph came 
into the land of Israel, but when he heard that 
Archelaus — to whom he hoped that Samaria only, 
or Galilee, or the region beyond Jordan, might be 
assigned — " did reign in Judea, he was afraid to go 
thither." Precisely here, where the wording of St. 
Matthew's Gospel has legal precision, skeptics as- 
sume that St. Matthew says that St. Joseph was 
going to Bethlehem ; and then they argue, that when 
this new fact is joined to his statement that Jesus 
was born in Bethlehem, and to his silence as to His 
Mother's living elsewhere, it is certain that St. Mat- 
thew took Bethlehem to have been her home. 

All this is clearly wrong. St. Joseph was told by 
the angel to "go into the land of Israel," and then 
the narrative, through its mention of his being afraid 
to go into Judea, is definite as to the province where 
St. Joseph was going, and it is definite as to nothing 
else. It does not say whether St. Joseph meant to 
dwell in Jerusalem, or in Bethlehem, or in Hebron, 
or elsewhere in Judea. And if St. Joseph had been 
going back to Bethlehem the verse would probably 
have run thus : " When he heard that Archelaus did 
reign in Judea he was afraid to go to Bethlehem." 
It may, however, be said that, as the holy Child 
was born there, and as the Holy Family set out from 
thence when they fled into Egypt, the fair presump- 
tion is that they were going back to Bethlehem. That 
is a fair presumption ; still St. Matthew does not say 
they had any such purpose ; and there is a strong 
presumption from his narrative that St. Joseph had 
no thought of going to Bethlehem again. The 



214 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Egyptian Jews were in constant communication 
with their mother country, and St. Joseph, alive to 
every rumor, could not have been ignorant of the 
murder of the boys of Bethlehem ; and it is not 
to be thought that, without a divine command, he 
would have dwelt among that bereaved people, in 
the last place where the Holy Family could have 
lived in happiness or in safety. 

And there is another strong presumption against 
it. When recalled into the land of Israel the 
breadth of the command was consistent with his 
dwelling any where within the original boundaries 
of the tribes ; but only in Judea was the sanctity 
that once hallowed all the land of Israel unprofaned ; 
and there was the temple of the one living and true 
God. It is probable, then, that St. Joseph was go- 
ing to the holy city. There he would be cheered 
with the piety of Zacharias and Elisabeth, of Simeon 
the Just, of Anna the aged prophetess, and of all 
who looked for redemption in Israel. There, in the 
Temple, he might take counsel with God. And he 
naturally felt that the holy city was the only fitting 
place in which to bring up the holy Child. But 
the earthly guardian of the Mother and the Child 
was burdened with great responsibilities, and even 
before he heard about Archelaus he may not have 
fully decided what he ought to do. Thus we come 
back to the indefinitely definite statement of the 
Evangelist, that the family was on its way to Judea. 
That is all we are told ; still, it is very certain that 
they had no thought of living in Bethlehem, and it 
is very probable that the decision of the question 



THE DWELLING IN NAZARETH. 21 5 

whether they should live in Jerusalem, or in He- 
bron, or elsewhere, was left to the councils of holy 
men and women, the course of events, and the in- 
timations of the will of God. 

Those skeptics who say that St. Matthew makes 
Bethlehem the home of Joseph and Mary also say 
that they dwelt in Nazareth solely because of a di- 
vine command, and then they argue that here Mat- 
thew and Luke are at twofold variance, that they 
disagree as to the home before the birth, and as to 
how it came to be afterwards at Nazareth. Error 
here fits curiously well to error. But if the reserve 
of St. Matthew as to the blessed Mother explains 
his passing over the fact that her home was in 
Nazareth when he speaks of her in Bethlehem, it 
explains it in all cases, be they ever so many. 

Even had St. Matthew said that Nazareth became 
the home of the Holy Family by a divine command, 
he would then have given the supernatural, and 
St. Luke the natural, reason why the holy Child 
was brought up in Nazareth ; and it might have well 
been said that a supernatural direction properly de- 
cided so great a question. 

But the facts were these : Tidings of the death 
of Herod and of the accession of Archelaus went 
down to Egypt very close together ; yet before the 
couriers, racing over the desert, had carried the 
later news, St. Joseph, told by the angel of the 
death of Herod, was on his way " to the land of 
Israel;" for while journeying over that same desert, 
he thought that Antipas, a prince of a gentler kind 
than Archelaus, was in his father's place. When 



2l6 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

he came into the settlement and heard the ominous 
news then flying over the seas to Rome, of the 
massacre in and around Jerusalem, that signalized 
the accession of Archelaus to power, St. Joseph 
feared those hills, whose dark outlines he saw along 
the eastern edge of the plain. He dared not enter 
the pass that winds its way up to the city. He had 
reasonable, insoluble, fearful doubts, and knew not 
where to go. In his perplexity he was told to 
move on to Galilee. He was told that much, but 
no more. The burden on his soul had been that 
he must take the holy Child into holy Judea, and 
when told that he might move on to Galilee, he 
knew just where to go in Galilee ; and by saying 
" he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth," 
St. Matthew refers his going there to St. Joseph 
himself; for, otherwise, he would have said, " Being 
warned of God in a dream, he turned aside to Naz- 
areth in Galilee." The words of St. Matthew point 
to some fact that he does not state ; and learning 
from St. Luke that the home of Joseph had been 
in Nazareth before he went to Bethlehem, we know 
why Joseph, divinely told that he might go into 
Galilee, went to Nazareth. He had lived there be- 
fore, and had been only a few months away. 

How it came about that the holy Child was 
brought up in that wicked town would never have 
been known, but for St. Luke. There would have 
been none to tell that, perhaps ages before, some 
of David's humbled line had sought the village at 
the head of the glen, out of the way of armies, too 
poor and too weak to provoke the cupidity or the 



THE EVIL FAME OF NAZARETH. 2\J 

anger of kings, and that the Virgin lived there be- 
fore she was called to King David's town of Bethle- 
hem. 

Another example of how one verse of Scripture 
often clears up another is seen in the verses, " Then 
was fulfilled that which was spoken by the proph- 
ets, He shall be called a Nazarene," and, "Can 
any good thing come out of Nazareth ? " From 
Nathanael's question we know that Nazareth was a 
village of evil fame ; and this agrees with what St. 
Luke alone tells of the evil conduct of the Nazarenes, 
so unlike any thing that Jesus met with elsewhere 
in Galilee. 

I do not remember having ever seen even a con- 
jecture as to why Nazareth had that character, but 
may not the reason be found in the following facts ? 
The village was at the head of a pass that, in five 
or six miles, winds its steep way more than a thou- 
sand feet above the rich plain of Esdraelon. In the 
troubled times in Israel, marauding Arabs came 
into that open plain and carried off flocks and har- 
vests. The Nazarenes may have gone down there 
for plunder, and if pursued on their way back, no 
body of horsemen could well have followed them, 
(though the valley be somewhat open,) for here and 
there a few ruffians could have held the way against 
a hundred armed men. The land, under the Ro- 
man rule, was quiet, and flocks and herds and har- 
vests were secure, but an evil name and an evil 
character live long. 

Whether this be sufficient to account for it or 
not, it is certain that Nazareth had a bad name. 



218 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

All the prophets, consenting together, foretold that 
the Messiah would be despised, and Joseph, by 
living in Nazareth, unconsciously aided in the ful- 
filling of their prediction. For thus it came to pass 
that Jesus was styled the Nazarene. The reproach 
of this name passed over to his people, and to this 
day, wherever the widespread Arabic is spoken, his 
people are known to Jews and Mohammedans as 
Nazarenes. 

Heretofore the defense of these chapters of St. 
Matthew — two chapters so much spoken against 
that if defended, unbelievers must confess that there 
are no chapters in the Gospels that may not be de- 
fended — has given no reason why St. Matthew did 
not say that Nazareth originally was, and that Beth- 
lehem was not, the home of Joseph and Mary. Yet 
one thing should have been clear. It was so nat- 
ural for Matthew to say that little about Bethle- 
hem, or that little about Nazareth, it was so diffi- 
cult for him to keep from some intimation of how 
the facts were, that only by design could he have 
avoided every thing of the kind. With this in 
mind, it seems as if he struck out something writ- 
ten in his first two chapters, and this would give 
them the fragmentary look they are thought to 
have, and the like of which is nowhere else in his 
Gospel. But whether he left out something, or 
whether the pages now stand as he wrote them at 
first, his veiling of that fact as to Nazareth may 
have come from his unwillingness to disclose more 
than he must disclose concerning the blessed Mother 
and her kindred. From what he wrote an inquis- 



ST. MATTHEWS CAUTION. 219 

itor might have taken Bethlehem to have been 
originally her home ; but as to that, he needs no 
defense, for whether he was bound to tell all he 
knew was a question for him to decide. 

All the Jews knew that Jesus came from Naza- 
reth ; his enemies never tired of calling him the 
Nazarene, and St. Matthew's stating only what they 
knew so well proves that he did not care to have 
it known, from what he wrote, that Nazareth was 
aforetime the home of the blessed Mother and her 
kindred ; but still, my idea of his reserve as to 
Nazareth (or rather, of the reason for it, for the fact 
is certain) may seem to my friendly and tireless 
reader to carry St. Matthew's caution beyond all 
bounds. And yet, though I had to confess that in 
my view of St. Matthew's course at this point there 
is something that looks like excess of prudence, still 
I might repeat that it is caution I am proving, not 
why it went further than we might think it would ; 
and that it would be hard, when so many of the 
circumstances in which he wrote are forgotten, even 
to conjecture the forms it might take, and just how 
far it would go. 

And I yet have evidence that may have some 
bearing on the question as to Nazareth, while it 
strengthens my general argument. With this evi- 
dence I close the case, and submit it to the Church, 
holy and universal. My readers will have noted 
that more than once I have spoken of St. Mat- 
thew's caution, not only for the blessed Mother, 
but also for her kindred, when he sent his Gospel 
forth amid the perils in which the first Christian 



220 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

martyr died. I now ask attention to evidence of 
his caution for them. As evidence of his general 
caution I have before pointed to his silence concern- 
ing the healing of the son of the nobleman of Ca- 
pernaum, and I would have my readers picture for 
themselves busy Capernaum on the day that mira- 
cle was wrought — the crowds marveling in the 
gates, in the market-place, and around the house. 
It was the first kindling up of the great light that 
was to shine along " the way of the sea." It opened 
the way for the dwelling of Jesus in Capernaum. 
It may have led to the conversion of St. Matthew. 
But I touch upon these things only to bring out the 
greatness of the wonder that Matthew does not 
speak of that miracle. Neither does Mark or Luke. 
It seems most strange ! 

One of the Fathers tells us to study the Gospels, 
searching for the reason of each recorded fact. Here 
it is in the line of his precept to search for the rea- 
son why a miracle is not recorded where we should 
think it would have been, for surely we may look 
for a record of that miracle in the Gospels of both 
St. Matthew and St. Peter, for they were Caper- 
naum people. They knew that nobleman, for Peter 
had sold fish in the court-yard of his palace, Mat- 
thew had receipted for his tax. And in the third 
Gospel the record may also be looked for, for it was 
a Galilean miracle. 

My readers will remember that when Jesus 
wrought this miracle in Capernaum He was Himself 
in Cana. They will also remember that this was 
the second miracle that Jesus did in Cana of Gali- 



CANA OF GALILEE. 221 

lee ; and that, although the earlier miracle was the 
first manifestation of the divine energy of the Lord, 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are silent as to both. It 
is true those two miracles were before the imprison- 
ment of the Baptist, from which the earlier Evangel- 
ists date the fullness of our Lord's ministry ; but 
we feel that this can hardly be the sufficient and 
full reason for this remarkable and continuous si- 
lence of all those Evangelists concerning the mira- 
cles in Cana of Galilee. 

As both of them were wrought in the same vil- 
lage, possibly the place had something to do with 
their silence. And I think we shall conclude that 
it did grow out of the fact that Cana was the home 
of kindred of the Virgin. It was their home at the 
wedding-feast ; for she was there, ordering with a 
kinswoman's right, and her Son was sent for and 
came to the wedding. Nazareth was then her 
home ; but after the brutal rage of the Nazarenes 
toward Jesus it could not long have been the home 
of any of her kindred. Sooner or later their spite- 
ful neighbors must, in every evil way, have worried 
them out of the town. They were too poor to go 
far. Cana was not far, and it was already the home 
of some of them. The holy Mother lived in Jerusa- 
lem with St. John ; but that Cana became the shel- 
ter for her kindred, from time to time the gather- 
ing place of them all, I think is certain from the 
silence of the three earlier Evangelists as to that vil- 
lage. While inquisitors were searching all the way 
to Damascus for the blessed Mother and for her 
kindred, St. Matthew would not draw attention to 



222 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

that village. He knew that his colleague St. John 
would record those miracles — in one of which the 
fact that he was screening could not but appear — 
and he said not a word of Cana. His reason for 
caution continued when the second Gospel was 
written ; there was his example also ; and St. Mark 
said not a word of Cana. Before the third Gospel 
was written all need of caution for the blessed 
Mother had ceased ; but, as in the case of the family 
of Bethany, there was still reason for caution con- 
cerning the kindred of the holy Virgin ; and like St. 
Matthew and like St. Mark, both of whose exam- 
ples were before him, St. Luke said not a word of 
Cana. That silence was not broken till Zion was a 
plowed field — then, when all need of caution had 
passed, the last evangelist told of the marriage and 
the miracles in Cana of Galilee. 



In Nazareth Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, 
in wicked Nazareth he grew " in favor with God and 
man." He lived there until he was " about thirty 
years of age." He waited there for " the fullness 
of time ; " and that waiting in years of silence 
is not the least instructive lesson of His life. Mean- 
while " the fullness of time " was preparing. The 
weak and cruel Archelaus ruled for some eleven 
years ; then the Emperor Augustus, feigning to 
yield to the outcries of the Jews, but carrying out a 
policy determined upon before the death of Herod, 
banished Archelaus to Gaul, where he died an exile. 
The Emperor then annexed Judea to the imperial 



JUDEA IN THE ROMAN AGE. 223 

province of Syria. Thus, at the time of the con- 
demnation of the Son of Man the union of Judea 
with Rome was a more direct and vital one than 
that of such districts as Galilee or the regions be- 
yond Jordan, where native princes (Herod Philip 
and Herod Antipas) were suffered to rule ; and it 
was more direct and vital than that of provinces 
over which the Senate had a nominal sovereignty — 
so much had the Emperor become identified with 
Rome. 

In Syria, at Antioch, once the regal city of Greek 
kings who succeeded to dominions of Alexander, 
Caesar was represented by a propraetor. In Judea 
he, in his turn, was represented by a procurator, 
(the Roman governor of the Evangelists.) His pal- 
ace was at Caesarea, by the sea, and from time to 
time he came up to Jerusalem. He enriched him- 
self and his minions, and, careless of all else, he in- 
terfered but little with the local and ecclesiastical 
rule of the Sanhedrim. That parliament of the Jews 
was hardly more than a tradition during the long 
tyranny of Herod, but it had regained, and was 
sternly bent on keeping, a little of power. Tibe- 
rius, the heir of Augustus Caesar, was severe and 
jealous, yet impartial. Under his rule the imperial 
provinces had less cause of complaint than under 
the rule of some of the later Emperors ; and the 
change from the Herodian to the imperial house, 
and the restoration to the Sanhedrim of a sem- 
blance of its ancient honors, was followed by com- 
parative repose. Yet the Romans troubled the 
people, and so did the ecclesiastic noblesse. They 



224 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

suffered from the Romans in common with others, 
yet secretly they favored their rule. The people, 
deluded by their leaders yet mistrusting them, 
grew more unquiet, more and more bitter against 
the Romans, until, at last, the exactions of the rep- 
resentatives of Caesar, and the restlessness caused 
by the popular expectation of the coming of the 
Messiah, drove the Jews into that war with Rome 
which was the beginning of their punishment for 
the crime of rejecting the Son of Man. While the 
storm was gathering there was a breathing space. 
In that pause Christ Jesus came, and only then, in 
the Roman Age in Palestine, was the state of the 
government and of the people such that even His 
brief ministry was possible. 

Both the date of the Gospels and the historic 
truthfulness of the Evangelists are attested by their 
living intimacy with the character and life, the 
hopes and fears, the opinions, prejudices, and pas- 
sions of the Jews in the interval between the ban- 
ishment of Archelaus and the fall of Jerusalem, and 
with the peculiar and complicate state of political 
and social affairs in Judea. They take us right into 
the midst of them. They give no formal descrip- 
tions of them, for they do not feel the need of any. 
They take them to be known to all as uncon- 
sciously as seamen take seafaring ways to be known 
to every body. St. Matthew and St. John tell of 
what they had seen and heard. St. Mark had seen 
something of what he described, and both St. Mark 
and St. Luke knew from living men of the things 
of which they wrote. It is almost as apparent when 



THE VOYAGE OF ST. PAUL. 225 

St. Luke treats of what was done in Judea that he 
is treating of what took place in his own day and 
generation as the like is in the writings of the other 
Evangelists ; and this is quite as apparent when he 
takes us out of that country. The minute accuracy 
of his descriptions has often been shown, and never 
better than in what a seaman did to clear up and 
verify the narrative of the shipwreck of St. Paul.* 
The writings of the Evangelists unmistakably 

* An Englishman, James Smith, Esq., of Jordanhill, who in his 
yacht made voyages to clear up the voyage of St. Paul. He studied 
the building, rigging, and handling of the ships of the ancients ; he 
sailed the seas over which the Apostle was borne ; felt their winds, 
noted their currents, the headlands of the coasts, and visited their 
harbors. He knew how sailors describe the land as seen from 
shipboard, and understood the meaning of their terms, which, as 
repeated by. St. Luke, had puzzled ministers. His sea-faring, his 
knowledge of the matter in hand, and his good sense, cleared up 
all that had been obscure in St. Luke's journal of the voyage ; and 
some strange fancies then disappeared — such as that of the poet 
Coleridge, who, having written " The Rhyme of the Ancient Mar- 
iner," was very sure that he must be right in his opinion that the 
scene of the shipwreck was in the Adriatic, a nautical impossibility 
as the course of the vessel and the winds were ; or that of another 
dreamer, who was equally sure that the hunger of those storm- 
tossed heathen was a voluntary fast for the good of their souls! 
The readers of the latest English Life of St. Paul are not made 
aware how much the elucidation of the voyage by the clergyman 
owes to the book of the sailor, (published by Longman in 1848, and 
not, I think, reprinted here ; ) but in their Life of the Apostle 
Conybeare and Howson justly speak of it as "a standard work not 
only in England but in Europe." The sailor showed what can be 
done when the right man takes hold of a thing in the right way. 
What he did was well done and well worth the doing ! Yet such 
the self-evidencing force of simple truthfulness, that I cannot but 
think that all right-minded souls have ever felt as sure of the truth 
of St. Luke's picture of the voyage as they do now, when, point by 
point, it has been cleared up, tested and proved. 
15 



226 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

belong to the time of which they treat. Only men 
who lived in that time could have known it so well. 
Some of the evidence of this comes from out-of-the- 
way places, where scholars have to hunt it up ; as 
when, for instance, a peculiar title given by St. 
Luke to the magistrates of Thessalonica was found 
on an inscription of that time on a crumbling wall 
in that city. But no antiquarian lore is needed for a 
just appreciation of the best part of this kind of 
evidence for the time in which the Gospels were 
written. The best part of this evidence is like the 
best part of the evidence in nature of the being of 
God, which comes not of dredging in the sea, nor 
from delving in the strata of the earth, nor from 
calculating the flight of comets ; it comes not from 
discoveries that make us think of man's cleverness 
as well as of the wisdom of God, but comes from 
the broad, open face of nature, from the earth and 
the sky, from the mountains, the plains, the rivers, 
and the sea. That best part of the evidence of the 
being of God is open, is common to all, and is so 
clear that science can no more add to its satisfying 
power than it can take it away. And thus open, 
common, and clear to all is the best part of the evi- 
dence of the historic truthfulness of the holy 
Gospels. 



PART THIED. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN GOSPEL. 

jT/gjET us open the Third Part of this volume 
\ILi/ with a glance at the relations of the Miracles, 
Discourses, and Parables in the Four Gospels 
to the oral Gospel. The recorded miracles are 
thirty-three in number. The sacramental miracle, 
the feeding of the five thousand, is the only one 
that is given by all the Evangelists. Six miracles 
are given only by St. John. To find out which of 
the other twenty-seven miracles belonged to the 
oral Gospel I count those that are common to the 
three earlier Gospels. As we might almost have 
known beforehand, their number is twelve. They 
are : the cleansing of leprosy, the cure of fever, of 
paralysis, of a withered hand, of blindness, of an 
issue of blood ; but the record of the last is inter- 
woven with that of another miracle. The other 
five are the walking on the sea, the stilling of the 
storm, the feeding of the five thousand, the cure of 
the demoniacs, the raising of the dead. 

In these miracles Jesus is the giver of the bread 
of life, the redeemer from the leprosy, the fever, the 
paralysis of sin, the Saviour from death, the conse- 



228 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

quence of sin. They reveal his power over nature 
and over the spirits of evil. The teaching of this 
cycle of typical signs is very complete, and these 
twelve miracles (more than any others, save some 
that are given only by St. John) are the miracles 
that now dwell in the mind and memory of the 
family of Christ. 

Such the confidence of His chosen Witnesses in 
the proof they offer of the divinity of the Lord that 
they feel there is no need to accumulate even such 
evidence of it as the raising of the dead. They 
select but one such miracle for their oral Gospel ; 
and their example accounts for the absence of the 
miracle at Nain from the first and second Gospels. 

Of the other fifteen miracles in the earlier Gos- 
pels five are twice told. Three of these — the feed- 
ing of the four thousand, the healing of the daugh- 
ter of the Syro-Phcenician woman, and the withering 
of the fig-tree — are given by St. Matthew and by St. 
Mark. The healing of the demoniac in the syna- 
gogue at Capernaum is given by St. Mark and by 
St. Luke, and the cure of the centurion's servant by 
St. Matthew and by St. Luke. All of the fifteen 
miracles formed a part of the teaching of the Wit- 
nesses. Still, I think it likely that only the twelve 
miracles, common to the earlier Gospels, belonged 
to the more fixed, authoritative, common form of 
the oral Gospel ; for I find in the recital of nearly 
every one of those fifteen miracles (if not, indeed, in 
all of them) some relation between them and the 
characters of the Evangelists or the plans of their 
Gospels, such as goes to account for the Evangelists' 



THE FIFTEEN MIRACLES. 229 

overstepping the bounds of the oral Gospel. Thus 
the two miracles that are in the second Gospel 
only, are cures of blindness and deafness wrought 
gradually, with some use of means ; and such un- 
common facts would naturally strike the curious 
and active mind of St. Peter. Two blind men were 
taken into a house and charged to say nothing of 
what was done, and St. Matthew may have given 
this miracle because of its unwonted privacy ; not, 
indeed, (and throughout this inquiry it is to be kept 
in mind in all similar cases,) that the reason given 
is the sole or the chief reason, but merely that it is 
the reason seen from our present stand-point. 

When St. Matthew tells of the smiting of Malchus 
we listen to one who was there, though some argue, 
from his silence as to the healing of the wound, that 
here his Gospel is fragmentary or legendary. The 
wound was little thought of on that awful night, 
and St. Matthew speaks of it, not for its own sake, 
but for the sake of what his Master said, and not so 
much for the words, " They that take the sword 
shall perish by the sword," memorable as they are, 
as for the words, " Thinkest thou that I cannot 
now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give 
me more than twelve legions of angels ? " Those 
words touch the darkness of that hour with a ray 
of " the light that never was on sea or land." 
Those words attest to the majesty of Jesus in that 
permitted hour of the Prince of this world. They 
do more — the reason for what then was suffered to 
be, was struck out (as truth often is) in the collision 
of events, for his words show that Christ Jesus sac- 



230 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

rificed Himself for the sins of His people, and that 
the prophets told of this beforehand. 

How strong the contrast here between the divine 
and the human ! And on the human side all how 
natural ! That eleven men of Galilee stood by and 
struck no blow for their Prophet, though strong the 
array that came against him, never could have been. 
Peter could not have been there, nor Thomas, who 
would have died for his Master, nor the two " sons 
of thunder." It would have disgraced human na- 
ture had not that blow been given for the Son of 
Man ! It almost redeems the after behavior of the 
disciples. That was strange, but their Master's 
course was strange to them. " Put up thy sword," 
they could not understand. Peter's mind and the 
minds of them all reeled with the shock. They all 
forsook him and fled. But they came at last to un- 
derstand ; and as often as St. Matthew recalled the 
never-forgotten night of woe and shame he thought 
of his Master's words ; but he neither then nor aft- 
erward gave a thought to the healing of the wound 
-^not that he forgot it, but it was to him as if he 
remembered it not. St. Luke, who was not there, 
wrote more as an historian would ; he tells of the 
healing, and this he was all the more likely to do, 
because it was a surgical miracle (the only one of 
its kind) and St. Luke was a doctor. 

In the recital of this train of events there is some 
confirmation, of what before was intimated of an 
argument for the date of the Gospels, that might be 
drawn from their handling of names. Peter knew 
not whom he struck, and cared not. In the stroke 



THE FIFTEEN MIRACLES. 23 1 

of his sword there was an outflash of Galilean fire 
that all the Disciples in their hearts admired ; yet, 
as it did not meet their Master's approval, they 
cared not to say who struck the blow, and the ab- 
sence from the earlier Gospels of the names of the 
smiter and the smitten is a natural one. St. John 
wrote when the lapse of time had deadened the 
early feeling, and in his narrative both names come 
out incidentally. That night Peter was in the court- 
yard of the palace, warming himself at a fire, for the 
night was cold. John (to whom the high-priest's 
household were known) was with him. " The son 
of thunder " was a brave man, but he never forgot 
the start of apprehension with which, in that peril- 
ous place and time, he heard a servant, whom he 
knew to be a kinsman of him who was struck, say 
to Peter, " Did I not see thee in the garden ? " 
St. John could hardly tell of these things without 
its coming out that Peter struck that man with his 
sword ; and, full of the memories of that night, he 
says, so naturally that we hear him say it, " And 
that man's name was Malchus." * 

To have imagined such a train of events was be- 
yond Shakspeare, its consistent naturalness was 
beyond De Foe ; yet this is only one (and is far 
from being the most striking one) of the multitude 
of narratives in the Evangeliad that are like it in 
consistency, in naturalness, in depths of truth be- 
yond the thoughts of men ; and when critics, with 
an insolent affectation of contempt for those who 
know better, decry the Gospels as legendary and 

* Matt, xxvi, 51; Mark xiv, 47; Lukexxiii, 51 ; Johnxviii, 10,18, 26. 



232 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

fragmentary, their criticisms can only be the out- 
come of their hatred of truth ! 

Antecedently it is probable that some of the 
fifteen miracles were selected out of those that be- 
longed to the oral Gospel. The miracle of the 
healing of the woman with a spirit of infirmity was 
also a cure of demonism ; that miracle and the cure 
of the man with dropsy were among the seven Sab- 
batical miracles. Great would be the loss of those 
narratives, even looking at them merely as lighting 
up the difficulties and dangers of the mercy of the 
Saviour, the evil spirit it called forth, and His way 
of meeting it ; and yet it should be noted (though 
it may press the argument too far) that those mira- 
cles are told only by the physician. 

Whatever be thought of this, it is characteristic 
that the collector of taxes tells (and he is the only 
one that does) of the miraculous procuring of silver 
to pay a tax. Of course there were other reasons, 
and on these let us pause for an instant. Some of 
the fathers, and some good interpreters since their 
time, hold this tax to have been the Roman trib- 
ute ; and it is a cheering sign of an ever-growing 
intelligence of Scripture that this has given place 
to the idea that it was the Temple tax. All Israel 
paid the Temple tax so readily that Peter promptly 
gave his word that his Master would pay it. His 
Lord's questions taught Peter his Lord's true rela- 
tion to the Temple ; for His theocratic claim that 
He was greater than the Temple is as clearly implied 
in the questions of the earlier Gospel as it is clearly 
expressed in the words of the last. 



THE FIFTEEN MIRACLES. 233 

To all the ridicule of the fish with the silver in 
its mouth it has often been well answered that 
while it became the Captain of our salvation (as He 
said at his baptism) to fulfill all righteousness, yet 
if he paid that tax there was a strong reason why, 
in so doing, he should vindicate his claim to be the 
Son of God, lest that payment should seem to con- 
tradict it. To those who have eyes to see, the mir- 
acle plainly shows the omniscience of the Lord and 
his power over the natural world. And what our 
Lord did is characteristic in its being suited to him 
for whom it was done, He who taught star-gazers by 
a star, teaching the fisherman by the miracle of the 
fish. St. Matthew tells of these things after he says 
that the disciples were exceeding sorry because of 
what their Lord foretold of His death ; and though 
there be an air of strangeness about this miracle, 
the infidel notion that here there is something 
legendary is decisively refuted by St. Matthew's 
handling of the history. Many have spoken 
against and many have defended this miracle, who 
have not marked that St. Matthew says nothing di- 
rectly about it. The miracle is always spoken of 
as if it were wrought : it comes into every list of the 
thirty-three recorded miracles, and yet there is no 
record of it. Surely this could not have been were 
there any thing legendary here, and surely any 
other writer would have said more. The sign-man- 
ual of Matthew the Silent is stamped on the page. 
He stops with the command of his Lord, and what 
he does not say is as effective as what any one else 
would have said. We are as sure from his silence 



234 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

as we could have been from any words, that Peter 
ran to the lake, threw the line, and paid the silver.* 
The healing of the daughter of the Syro-Phceni- 
cian woman is in keeping with the design of St. 
Matthew in that section of his Gospel where it 
comes in. The recital of the miraculous draught 

*Farrar says, in his "Life of Christ," (chap, xxxviii :) "When 
Paulus calls this ' a miracle for half a crown ' he only shows his own 
entire misconception of the fine ethical lessons in the narrative. 
Yet I agree with Olshausen in regarding this as the most difficult to 
comprehend of all the Gospel miracles." "It is remarkable," says 
Archbishop Trench, " and is a solitary instance of the kind, that the 
issue of this bidding is not told us." He goes on to say, indeed, that 
the narrative is evidently intended to be miraculous, and this impres- 
sion is almost universal. Yet the literal translation of our Lord's 
words may certainly be " on opening its mouth thou shalt get, or ob- 
tain, a stater ; and the peculiarities of the miracle and of the manner 
in which it is narrated leave in my mind a doubt whether some es- 
sential particular may not have been omitted or left unexplained." 
This insinuated questioning of the narrative has not escaped the 
writer of the infidel article on the Gospels in the "Encyclopaedia 
Britannica," and is there used against the Scriptures. 

The Commentary edited by Bishop Ellicott leans to the idea (sug- 
gested also by Farrar) that there was no miracle. " The wonder 
does not originate in our Lord's compassion, nor depend upon faith 
in the receiver, [how does he know that ?] nor set forth a spiritual 
truth. [But it was wrought in attestation of our Lord's divinity at a 
time when the Disciples greatly needed enlightenment and confirma- 
tion of faith, and there may have been special need of this in the 
training of Peter.] This would not be of much weight against a 
direct statement, but it may be of some significance in the excep- 
tional absence of such a statement. On these grounds some explain 
our Lord's words as meaning, in figurative language, that Peter was 
to catch the fish and sell it for a stater?' In view of such comments 
(and there is not space for others like them) the importance of what 
is said above of St. Matthew's style will be seen. Here, as in sev- 
eral other places, clearer insight into his peculiarities as a writer is 
needed, to clear up what has not been made clear by those who have 
written concerning this miracle. 



THE FIFTEEN MIRACLES. 235 

of fishes (at the call of the Apostles) did not consist 
with his plan in the earlier part of his Gospel ; nor 
did the describing of it consist with St. Peter's ret- 
icence as to things personal to himself. St. Luke, 
seeing their omission of this miracle, records it ; 
and that he did so seems providential (if the word 
may be permitted as conveniently expressing what 
cannot be misunderstood) when the teaching of this 
miracle, at the opening of our Lord's ministry, is 
compared with the teaching of the similar one after 
His resurrection, given only by St. John. 

So many have said that St. Matthew's Gospel 
has no plan that there is need of proving what has 
just been said, but this would pass our present lim- 
its. None have questioned that St. Luke had a 
plan, and every one will see that his recital of the 
healing of the ten lepers (given, like the parable of 
the Good Samaritan, only by him) is in fine accord 
with the spirit of his Pauline Gospel. On looking 
from our present point of view, he may be said to 
have given it a place for the sake of these words : 
" When one of the Ten saw that he was healed he 
turned back and with a loud voice glorified God 
and fell down on his face at the feet of Jesus giv- 
ing him thanks, and he was a Samaritan!' St. Luke 
passes over the typical and prophetic miracle of the 
withering of the fig-tree, a kind of acted parable, but 
he relates a parable of a fig-tree (given only by him) 
where the lesson is much the same.* And I think it 
has become certain to my readers, from the selection 
by the Evangelists of the fifteen miracles, that the 

* See St. Luke, chap. xvii ; 11-19. 



236 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

fullness of a living tradition was flowing around 
the Evangelists when they wrote. 

Reasoning in the same way concerning the dis- 
courses in their Gospels, we conclude that the whole 
or a part of the Sermon on the Mount belonged to 
the oral Gospel, and also the prophecy on Mount 
Olivet. Our Lord's prophecy of the destruction of 
Jerusalem must have had a place in all the early 
teaching of the Apostles ; but, though the proph- 
ecy passed far beyond the judgment of Jerusalem, 
yet having been fulfilled so far as Jerusalem was 
concerned, and having been thrice recorded, the 
prophecy (and for the same reason, in part, the 
Sermon on the Mount) is not given by the last 
Evangelist. 

Our course of reasoning farther leads to the con- 
clusion that three of the thirty recorded parables — 
the Sower, the Mustard-seed, and the Wicked Hus- 
bandman — belonged to the common oral Gospel. 
When we before said that the Evangelists thought- 
fully marked times and seasons when it was of psy- 
chological and spiritual moment, we should have 
said that St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke care- 
fully note the occasion or reason for our Lord's 
teaching in parables. The like, no doubt, was done 
by all the Twelve ; but they could hardly have noted 
our Lord's new manner of teaching without giving 
the first example of that manner ; and in that par- 
able, the Sower is Christ himself. The parable of 
the Mustard-seed, revealing that, from a small be- 
ginning, sure and vast would be the growth of the 
kingdom of Christ, conveyed instruction well-suited 



NO PARABLE IN THE LAST GOSPEL. 237 

to the early Christians, as also did the parable of the 
Wicked Husbandman, which is in such harmony 
with the word on Mount Olivet. Our course of 
reasoning also leads us to conclude that two other 
parables — the Lost Sheep and the Leaven — be- 
longed to the oral Gospel. Besides those five par- 
ables, it is probable that some of the ten given by 
St. Matthew and some of the twelve given by St. 
Luke, also formed part of the oral Gospel, although 
it is not likely that this was the case with all those 
twenty-two parables. 

By those who press the seeming difference be- 
tween the Evangelists, much has been made of the 
fact that there is no parable in the last Gospel ; but 
it seems to me that the thirty parables recorded in 
the Gospel before St. John wrote, may have been 
all the parables that our Lord ever uttered. If that 
were so, it would seem to end the matter ; but the 
charge is so made as not in. this way to be fully dis- 
posed of. For, in the last Gospel, our Lord's style 
and manner of teaching are said to be unlike His 
style and manner of teaching in the earlier Gospels, 
and one of the items of the evidence of this, is the 
absence of parables from the last Gospel. I have 
before touched upon this charge, and here reply to 
it only so far as parables are concerned. Our Lord 
made this kind of teaching so rich, so tender, so 
divinely wise, that we are apt to forget (although 
we are told so in the Scripture) that he did not use 
this kind of teaching until the more hopeful days 
of his ministry were over ; that his enemies drove 
him to it, and that he was not in the way of using 



238 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

it toward his friends. Now, in the first four chap- 
ters of St. John parables are not to be looked for, 
because those chapters are given to a time before 
our Lord began to use them. Neither are parables 
to be looked for in long discourses. There are none 
in the Sermon on the Mount, none in the Prophecy 
on Mount Olivet, though the word is there applied 
to a brief saying. Parables would have been out 
of place in our Lord's long, last farewell to his own 
family; and parables are not to be looked for in the 
chapters that tell of his Trial and Crucifixion ; nor 
in those that are given to what took place after his 
Resurrection. 

Here a little humble arithmetic avails ; for let us 
subtract from the twenty -one chapters of St. John 
the thirteen chapters in which no parables are to be 
looked for, and only eight remain. In the long 
chapter given to the Raising of Lazarus the circum- 
stances and the persons are such that there was no 
place for such teaching: and, thus, the question is 
narrowed down to seven chapters, that cover only 
as many days. The charge, then, comes to this : 
Seven days in the life of our Lord are recorded in 
the Gospel of St. John, in which he uttered no par- 
able ; and surely there may have been seventy times 
that number of such days in the course of the three 
years of his ministry ! 

In the last Gospel, the form of His utterance (as 
has often been noticed) is parabolic : " Whosoever 
drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall 
never thirst, but the water that I shall give him 
shall be in him a well oi water springing up into 



NO PARABLE IN THE LAST GOSPEL. 239 

everlasting life." And, as the evidence of the charge 
of variance between the earlier and the last Gospels 
so far as parables are concerned, has been ciphered 
down to the unimportant fact that for seven days, 
or parts of days, our Lord uttered no parable, it is 
clear that of the items of the evidence of that alleged 
variance this one of the parables must be struck 
from the list. 



240 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 




CHAPTER II. 

ST. JOHN AND THE EARLIER GOSPELS. 

LMOST unconsciously we have passed on to 
the relations of the Evangelists with each 
other. Reasons why the earlier Gospels were 
so limited to the ministry in Galilee and regions 
outside of Judea were given in treating of the 
division of the field of our Lord's ministry made 
between the elect Evangelists St. Matthew and St. 
John, and in treating of the general relations of St. 
Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke to the oral Gos- 
pel. But it has been charged that St. John dis- 
agrees with St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke as 
to the beginning of our Lord's ministry. This 
charge of variance grows out of the four earliest 
chapters of St. John's Gospel, which are given to 
ministrations in Judea before the imprisonment of 
the Baptist ; and we are to answer it by showing 
from those chapters that up to that date our Lord's 
course was of a tentative or preparatory kind. In 
those chapters relations of the final with the earlier 
Gospels, which meet other charges of variance, dis- 
close themselves ; and some further reasons for the 
structure of the earlier Gospels appear. The stand- 
point from which we look upon those chapters is 
not the common one. Their facts will be seen in 



THE BEGINNING OF THE MINISTRY. 241 

somewhat of a new light. They have given rise to 
several questions of their own ; and, interweaving a 
running comment into my argument, I shall discur- 
sively treat of those chapters with more fullness 
than my immediate purpose requires. 

There are beginnings on beginnings in the king- 
doms of nature and of grace. Things so run into 
each other that no one beginning excludes the 
thought of all others. What was, so becomes one 
with what is, that lines can hardly be drawn be- 
tween the stages of the growth of the present out 
of the past ; and though there be one instant when 
each created thing and each course of events most 
truly may be said to begin, yet to select, out of 
others that have some claim, the moment that has 
the most indisputable claim to rank as the begin- 
ning, is often equally difficult and unimportant. One 
history opens the story of a war with the hostilities 
that led to its declaration, another with the decla- 
ration itself; and, however it may be in science, it 
is sometimes a matter of indifference in history 
which of several moments is fixed upon as the be- 
ginning in a course of events, if it be a clear point 
of division. 

With some reason the baptism of Christ Jesus 
might be held to be the beginning of his ministry. 
Of the baptism there was nothing left for St. John 
to tell ; yet his silence concerning it is said to dis- 
credit the evidence of it in the other Gospels. This 
is strangely perverse, for St. John recites words of 
his old master that allude to facts at the baptism, 

and he leaves them unexplained, evidently because 
16 



242 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the previous Gospels had made the facts universally 
known. The personal witness of the Baptist to 
Christ Jesus, given only by St. John, was known to 
St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke only by hear- 
say ; yet there was a stronger reason for their pass- 
ing over that witness, and in this was more than 
their own wisdom ; for had they told of his witness 
when telling of the open heaven, the descent of the 
Spirit, and the Voice, the human testimony would 
have come too closely in contrast with testimony it 
could not equal, could not strengthen, and that 
needed nothing. Still that witness was precious ; 
and the same Will that forbade its utterance by them 
treasured it up in the faithful heart of the Baptist's 
own disciple until it was given in a Gospel where 
its power is not lessened by too immediate compar- 
ison with the witness from heaven. 

The great orator was not wholly a man of fiery 
zeal, of invective bitter and bold even to the verge 
of rashness. St. Matthew's portrait of the last He- 
brew prophet is true to the life, but is only one 
portrait ; that which St. John drew of his old mas- 
ter, whom he knew so well that he not only revered 
but loved him, is another portrait. The difference 
has not escaped the eyes of hostile critics ; but the 
good sense and good feeling of the Baptist's coun- 
sel to soldiers and publicans (in the third Gospel) 
harmonizes the portrait by St. Matthew with that 
by St. John. The one drawn by his pupil has fine 
touches and a grandeur of its own ; and these 
things are noteworthy, not for their own sake only, 
but because there is some difference between St. 



DESCRIPTION OF THE BAPTISM. 243 

Matthew's and St. John's portraiture of our Lord, 
that may, perhaps, be traced in part to a similar 
cause; for the pupil of the herald and the " be- 
loved " of the King had been nearer to both, than 
St. Matthew. 

There are touches of difference in the descriptions 
of the Baptism, and one of these is characteristic of 
the third Gospel. St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. 
Luke all mark that the signs were revealed after 
our Lord came up out of the water, after he had 
done what He himself said it was his duty to do ; 
but only St. Luke says they were revealed when our 
Lord prayed. St. Luke repeatedly speaks of our 
Lord's praying when the other Evangelists do not, 
as at His transfiguration ; or with more emphasis 
than they, as when ■' He prayed earnestly, and his 
sweat was as it were great drops of blood." There 
may have been something in St. Luke's own expe- 
rience that made him more alive than the others to 
the praying of the Lord. If that were so, still there 
is another fact that should go with it: St. Luke, 
one of the heathen-born, was quick to mark our 
Lord's habit of prayer; for prayer, such as the 
Psalms had made familiar to all the children of 
Israel, was quite unknown- to the heathen. But 
hereafter we may see reason to refer this character- 
istic of the third Gospel not so much to the expe- 
rience of the Evangelist as to the experience of St. 
Paul, of whom the Lord said at Damascus, " Behold, 
he prayeth." 

What the Baptist says of knowing Jesus has been 
strangely dealt with, for it is consistent and clear. 



244 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Jesus was not known to him personally before they 
met by the river ; and this might be inferred from 
St. Luke's saying that, until the time of his showing 
unto Israel, John lived in the desert — the Arabian 
Desert — that great sand ocean that laved the hill 
country of Judea on the south, and came up so 
near to Hebron that it was as natural for the boys 
of Hebron to go down there as for boys living in 
sight of the ocean to go to sea. Born as a sign 
unto Israel, the child of the old priest was safest in 
the black tents of some kindred or friendly Emir of 
the desert. That he was brought up there explains 
St. Matthew's picture of his dress and manner of 
living — the raiment of camels' hair, the leathern 
girdle, and the locust meat. He came unto Israel 
in the garb as well as in the spirit of Elias ; for, in 
dress and manner of life, Elijah was an Arab of the 
desert. 

Jesus and John never met before, but doubtless 
Jesus told John that he was the son of Mary, the 
kinswoman of his mother; and though John's par- 
ents must have died when he was little, doubtless 
he afterward heard of the signs at the birth of his 
cousin ; for, before the baptism, he looked up to 
Jesus, apparently with the hope that he was the 
Messiah. 

The Baptist came to call the people to repent- 
ance. It was a proverb with the Jews, that " if 
Israel would repent for one day the Messiah would 
come ;" and along the line of this feeling the Bap- 
tist did prepare the way of the Lord ; but this is 
what he himself said of the chief end and aim of his 



PRIVACY OF THE BAPTISM. 245 

coming : " He that sent me said, Upon whom thou 
shalt see the Spirit descending and remaining, the 
same is he that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost, and 
that he should be manifest to Israel ; therefore I am 
come baptizing with water." When the sign was 
given the Baptist's hope became a certainty, and 
then he knew, what before he knew not, that Jesus 
was " the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin 
of the world." 

With greater reason the Baptism might be held 
to be the beginning of our Lord's ministry — as in 
some true sense it was — had its signs and wonders 
been open and visible. Our habit of thinking that 
they were, is so fixed that it is hard to change it ; 
and yet we ought rather to have thought they were 
not visible, for the great moments in the kingdom 
of grace do usually " come without observation ; " 
and it was so then. Even as the eye sees not the 
spiritual miracles that now pass before it, so then 
the common eye saw nothing in the baptism of 
Jesus different from the baptism of others. This is 
implied in St. Luke's description. This is also cer- 
tain from the Baptist's privately making known 
who Jesus was to a few of his own disciples ; and it 
is stamped upon the words, " I saw and bear wit- 
ness " — words of one who speaks for himself alone. 
To him alone of all that multitude was given what 
the Scripture calls " open vision." To all but him 
the Son of Man went down into the water and came 
up out of the water like the rest. The Congregation 
of the Lord, who now forever behold the open 
heavens, the Spirit descending, and hear the voice, 



246 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

are highly favored above those who were baptized 
the same day with Christ in the Jordan. 

Our Lord is not said to have spoken of the signs 
at his baptism. The words, " There was a man sent 
to bear witness," prove that all human knowledge 
of them rests on the testimony of the Baptist ; and 
St. Peter may have had this in mind when he said 
that the one to be chosen as an apostle must be of 
those who had known the Baptist. St. Matthew, 
St. Mark, and St. Luke are inspired vouchers for 
the truth of what the Baptist said, yet their knowl- 
edge of the Baptism came from him, and he is the 
sole witness of its signs and wonders. His testi- 
mony, whether heard from his own lips by St. 
Peter, or from the lips of his disciples, made the 
baptism so real to the Evangelists that their de- 
scriptions of it read as if they themselves had beheld 
its wonders. The Baptist's witness convinced then, 
and it convinces now. It is true, those signs bring 
their own evidence. That any one could have im- 
agined things so fitting the hour, the Man, and the 
world's future is not possible. In virtue of what 
they are, and of their having been made known in 
the Gospel, they are divine testimony to Christ 
Jesus ; and yet the Baptist's human testimony to 
those signs and wonders is hardly less effectual, so 
much nearer to us is the man than the facts. He 
is their sufficient witness to the human race. It 
seems to me that if one had seen the rending of 
the heavens and heard the voice he could doubt it 
as easily as he could doubt the word of the Baptist. 
What Josephus says of his power with the people 



THE WITNESS OF THE BAPTIST. 247 

seems unhistorical, inexplicable, almost impossible, 
for the Baptist wrought no miracle ; and, save as 
opening the way in the hearts of a few of his disci- 
ples for the Messiah, his influence over the people 
came to nothing; yet what Josephus says is borne 
out by the Pharisees when they would not answer 
the question of Jesus " because they feared the 
people." * Our Lord, also, said there never had 
been a greater man than John the Baptist, f and 
the power of his solitary witness is the seal set in 
history to our Lord's declaration. 

Besides his witness to those signs and wonders 
there is a witness of the Baptist to Christ Jesus, 
given only in the final Gospel. Besides that, there 
is a still weightier witness in the surprising way in 
which St. John brings the Baptist into the sublime 
prelude to his Gospel. In that prelude the Apostle 
reveals the Eternal Word as He is hardly with equal 
clearness elsewhere revealed. The Apostle speaks 
with an awe-inspiring earnestness, yet with the 
calmness of deepest thought. He bends the whole 
force of his mind to make the facts as clear as they 
are certain. The inexpressible was never so well 
expressed. Never was so much truth embodied in 
words so few ; not even when in the space of the 
palm of the hand Moses wrote of the world's gen- 
eration, from the quickening of the first form of 
matter by the element Light, until it grew to be 

* See Matt. 21, 23-27 

f See Matt, xi, 2-15 : "Verily I say unto you, Among them that 
are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the 
Baptist." 



248 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the fitting home of man. St. John recalls that reve- 
lation because of the correspondence between the 
material and the spiritual worlds ordained by the 
Word who created both, and from it he takes the 
figure of Light, which in each is the symbol of the 
Word creating. The compass of his revelation 
transcends that of Moses as much as the spiritual 
transcends the material universe, and yet it is even 
more compressed. The utterance is measured and 
rhythmical, the statements are reduplicated, but this 
is the zigzaging of lightning that at night suddenly 
illuminates the heavens. Almost inconceivable is 
the swiftness of the thoughts ! Most astounding, 
then, this sudden interruption, " There was a man 
sent from God whose name was John." We seem 
to have come to the end of the train of thought ; 
but no, for St. John goes on with it again as if there 
had been no interruption. What can this mean ? 
How came this verse into such a revelation ? What 
place can there be for this fact in this wonderful 
procession of facts ? Why is this man here, as if 
here he could witness to the Eternal Word ? We 
know the man ! He was mortal like us. He was 
beheaded in the dungeon at Machasrus. He was 
born in King Herod's time. His father was the old 
priest Zacharias. His mother was Elizabeth, of the 
daughters of Aaron. Why is he here in these days 
of the beginning? Can any thing make his pres- 
ence unobtrusive in the midst of this wonderful 
revelation ? 

Before trying to show that the Baptist's presence 
fits the train of thought, let me point to touches of 



THE WITNESS OF THE BAPTIST. 249 

a pupil's feeling for his old master. " A man was 
sent from God, whose name was John" — there 
speaks the enthusiast of other days ! So St. John felt 
in his youth, so he always felt, and never more than 
now! He says that man was sent to bear witness 
of the Light, and only a pupil could say, " He was 
not that Light." The words echo the thoughts of 
the boy who wondered at the Baptist, until he al- 
most believed he was the long-hoped-for of Israel ! 
These seemingly needless and strange words at such 
a place and time are the clear mark and sign that 
the writer is St. John. By those words, the far-see- 
ing Wisdom, who works out His own Will through 
the nature of man, provides against the unbelief of 
these times ! 

But there is more than a pupil's honor for his 
master, there is more than the memory of an old 
man recalling his youth, in the place that St. John 
gives to the words, "There was a man sent from God 
to bear witness of the Light." The testimony he 
thus brings in is closely linked in his own soul with 
the great truths that open his Gospel ; for his soul is 
full of the thought of the Eternal Word ; he bears 
inspired witness to His glory — He is the Maker of 
all that is made, the Life in nature, the Light in the 
soul, the Unity of things created — and the witness 
which St. John the Apostle and Evangelist here 
bears to Christ Jesus as the Eternal W T ord, John 
the Baptist himself had borne. 

Here, in this sublime prelude to St. John's Gos- 
pel, whose far-reaching, wonderful revelation of the 
eternal glory of the Lord Jesus, has seemed to many 



250 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

unreconcilable with the earlier Gospels ; here, where 
this idea has been pressed with an almost unequaled 
strength of conviction, and with disastrous effect 
upon the faith of some who would fain believe ; here, 
where the train of thought is so strangely inter- 
rupted, the earlier Gospels justify that interruption ; 
and just here the relation between the earlier Gos- 
pels and the last Gospel proves that St. John so 
looked to them to make what he wrote intelligible 
that they are in perfect harmony with him as to the 
Eternal Glory of Christ Jesus. For one after the 
other, in almost the same words, (save with this in- 
structive difference, that what St. Matthew and St. 
Luke give as the utterance of Isaiah St. Mark gives 
as the utterance of all the Prophets,) each and all 
of those three inspired Evangelists declare that 
John the Baptist was the Voice who was to cry, 
" All flesh is grass, and the glory of man as the 
flower of grass; the grass withereth and the flower 
fadeth, but the Word of our God shall stand for- 
ever." * In that prophetic word the withering of 
the grass is not the quick passing away of mortals 
one by one, it is the withering away of the race of 
man. In the thought of God man's continuance on 
th*e earth is a duration as brief as that of the wither- 
ing grass to human thought, yet to us the genera- 
tions of men seem to come and go forever ; and it 
is the whole time-cycle of man (its briefness in the 
sight of God giving emphasis to the truth revealed) 
that is put in contrast with the Being of the Eter- 
nal Word. And this prophecy of the Eternal Word 
* Isaiah xl, 3-9. 



PLATO, PHILO, AND ST. JOHN. 25 1 

was the Baptist's cry in the wilderness, the burden 
of his message to Israel. By marking this, the ear- 
lier Evangelists (whose insight into the truths they 
reveal will ever be more apparent as man grows to 
be more in sympathy with their intelligence and 
grace) reveal the same truth that is revealed by St. 
John; and in them alone is found the reason — when 
once seen, a most sufficient, plain, and certain rea- 
son — why St. John brings the witness of the Baptist 
into the prelude to his Gospel. 

Scholars of a skeptical turn of mind have busied 
themselves with the question, Where did St. John 
get the germ of his idea of the Eternal Word ? 
Not choosing to see that the chapter of Genesis 
(which was in his mind while writing) may have 
suggested it, they used to say that he got it from 
Plato. This is one of many scholastic illusions 
closely verging on deceptions, that carrying with 
them a weight of authority to humble souls trouble 
their hearts ; yet there is no likelihood that St. John 
ever read a Dialogue of Plato, and if he had known 
all of Plato's Dialogues by heart he could not have 
gotten out of them what is not in them. That 
error is a thing of the past. Now they say that he 
found the germ of his thought in the books of Philo 
of Alexandria. It is time that this error was buried 
in the same charnel-house with the bones of the 
other. St. John's idea of the Word made flesh is 
conspicuously absent from the pages of Philo- 
Judaeus. He did know something of that revelation 
of the Word of God in Hebrew Scripture, which — as 
the Targums witness — was more thoroughly traced 



252 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

out and believed by the devout Jews of his time 
than, to our shame and loss, it is now ; but Philo 
would not follow that revelation where it passed 
into a prophecy of the man Christ Jesus. He was 
a mystic to whom the history of Israel was allegory; 
and he did not share in the belief of his countrymen 
in the Messiah as a man. Philo was a Deist ; and 
by logical consequence his belief in the Messiah, (if 
he can be said to have had any,) was of ghostlike 
unreality. 

It is common to all who thus seek for the germ 
of St. John's idea, that they will not see that he is 
stating facts, not s'etting forth opinions. If there 
must be a question here, it should be, Whence did 
he get his facts ? From inspiration, is the answer. 
But earlier revelation is ever a source of later revela- 
tion. The widening and deepening river that makes 
glad the City of God is one and the same river. 
St. John's knowledge came to him from the begin- 
ning of Scripture. It came to him from beholding 
in heaven a Man on whose head were many crowns, 
his vesture dipped in blood, with a name that no one 
knew but Himself, and that name was the Word of 
God. And his knowledge, to which the Holy Ghost 
gave all needed completeness of truth, alike in itself 
and its utterance, came, as he says himself, from 
what he had seen and heard of the Word of Life. 
And yet, apart from all these sources of his knowl- 
edge, earlier perchance than any of them, the germ 
of this knowledge in his soul was the fact that his 
old master, the Baptist, was the Voice foretold ; and 
of this there is evidence in that association of ideas 



THE WORDS OF ST. PETER. 253 

which led him to bring the Baptist into the midst 
of his own revelations of the Eternal Word. 

Before passing on let it be noted that not only 
do all the earlier Evangelists mark that John the 
Baptist bore witness to Christ as the Eternal Word, 
but that the chief Apostle applied the same proph- 
ecy that was the foreordained Cry in the Wilder- 
ness to Christ Jesus : " Ye are born again not of 
corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word 
of God which liveth and abideth forever. For all 
flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the 
flower of grass ; the grass withereth and the flower 
thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord en- 
dureth forever, and this is the Word which by the 
Gospel is preached unto you." 



254 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE EARLIER CHAPTERS OF ST. JOHN. 

fHAT the herald continued to proclaim the Mes- 
siah's coming after he knew that Jesus was 
the Messiah has been perplexing to some ; 
and the more so, because disciples of the Baptist 
are met with in the Acts some years after his death, 
and in the East the sect long continued.* All this 
is said to be irreconcilable with what the earlier 
Evangelists tell of the baptism of Jesus. It is said 
to prove that John was never, in his own mind, sub- 
ordinate to Jesus, that his course was independent, 
that he was only a reformer and preacher of repent- 
ance. But to minds that give any heed to the 
Evangelists all that gives rise to these infidel con- 
jectures is partially explained by what has been 
said of the privacy of the Baptism ; and, farther, it 
can be shown that the course of the herald was 
called for by the state of things in Judea. John 
was a man exceeding bold ; the fire of the desert 
burned in his veins ; yet true courage marches hand 
in hand with prudence, and John never preached 
in walled Jerusalem. He was earnest, he was stern, 

* This, however, was a general consequence of the Baptist's 
preaching, no doubt, and is not specially to be attributed to his con- 
tinuing in his work. 



PRUDENCE OF THE BAPTIST. 255 

but he had thoughtful delicacy of feeling. He was 
not sure that Jesus was the Messiah, yet his request 
to be baptized troubled him, (as it has so many 
since ;) for Jesus had to say to John, " Suffer it to 
be so." Such a man as John, when he knew that 
Jesus was the Christ, never went on with his work 
on his own responsibility, never without consulting 
with his Lord. The idea (from which our minds 
can hardly free themselves) that the signs at the bap- 
tism were visible to all, makes the course of our 
Lord and of the Baptist different from what we 
should think ; yet, when the whole state of the case 
is known, it is plain that it could hardly have been 
other than that which is described. The ministry 
of the Baptist was a divine intimation that the min- 
istry of the Messiah was nigh ; and the veiling of the 
signs at the consecration of Jesus to his work was a 
divine intimation that the full time of His ministry 
had not come. The Baptist's insight into the perils 
of the time was such that the question must have 
arisen whether Judea was a safe field for Jesus. St. 
Matthew at once, and more clearly than the other 
Evangelists, discloses the evil state of things ; yet 
St. John accords with St. Matthew. In his Gos- 
pel the Baptist tells the emissaries of the Sanhe- 
drim that the Messiah was then in the multitude 
around him ; that he would not hide. That far 
he went, but they knew he would go no further ; 
for even those " priests and Levites sent from Jeru- 
salem " dared not ask him who the Messiah was. 
They knew the Prophet would nof tell them. The 
near future justified the Prophet. The Roman 



256 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

power was some protection, yet even from the be- 
ginning Jesus was in danger from the ecclesiastics 
of Judea. His life was nowhere safe in that prov- 
ince, not even in the throng of the Baptist's adher- 
ents in the wilderness. The proclamation that the 
Messiah was coming at once aroused a wrath in 
Pharisee and Sadducee that never slumbered nor 
slept till John and Jesus were murdered, nor then, 
nor now ! 

The Son of God was truly man. No miracle 
taught him to speak or to read. He was not raised 
above care and danger. He was not free from fa- 
tigue of body; when tired he sat on Samaria's 
well ; and he was not always free from care of mind. 
Hard duties were laid upon him, and he had to find 
out what they were. He had to find his path, as 
men find theirs, by the use of all his faculties ; by 
watching the hintings and guidings of providence, 
by searching the Scriptures, by fervent prayer. 
God makes no mistakes, and his Son made none. 
He found the path of his duty as no man ever found 
it. He never mistook it ; he ever walked in it ; but 
man will never know the earnestness with which he 
sought and found and did his duty. Musing at St. 
Helena, Napoleon said of Christ Jesus, " In the 
power of his will I feel the power that created the 
world." 

The finer fabrics of human skill bear no painful 
trace of the designer's difficult thought or of the 
workman's hard toil. What is well and completely 
done seems in the retrospect to have been easily 
done. The beauty of the life of Jesus veils and 



PARTIES AMONG THE JUDEANS. 257 

hides its labor and pain. It is written, that he 
learned by what he suffered. He knew what was in 
man as no other has ever known ; yet he no more 
dispensed with prudent forethought than with food 
and sleep. 

" The heart is deceitful above all things, and des- 
perately wicked." The Pharisees' hatred of holi- 
ness was the root of their hatred toward Jesus ; yet 
the Pharisees thought they were pious, and the peo- 
ple were under the same delusion. They kept times 
and seasons, paid tithes, and made long prayers. 
How came it, then, that the Pharisees more than 
others were the deadly enemies of Christ Jesus ? 
How came it that in what they did against Christ 
Jesus they thought they were doing God service — 
as afterward one of them thought when consenting 
to the murder of St. Stephen ? The Pharisees were 
about six thousand in number ; the Sadducees were 
less numerous, but with both are to be numbered 
their families, dependents, and servants. The two 
sects formed the ruling class in Judea; all the polit- 
ical power the Romans left to the Jews was in their 
hands. The two rival sects combined the power of 
a hierarchy with that of an aristocracy. They had 
the ideas and aims that are common to all aristoc- 
racies ; the Pharisees were more prone to court the 
people, yet Pharisees and Sadducees, openly or 
secretly, worked together in upholding their com- 
mon power. The Herodians were the Bonapart- 
ists of that time ; they looked back to Herod and 
forward to what did come, when Agrippa regained 

his grandfather's throne. There was in Judea 
11 



258 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

a larger class that was distinct from the noblesse ; * 
yet in Judea, as every-where else, the nation was 
represented by, and in a manner identified with, 
the governing class. 

Christ was rejected by the people through the 
misrepresentations, solicitations, and maneuvering 
of their rulers ; yet in this the people sinned. But 
after his Resurrection, though his reappearing was 
for a short time, to a small circle, and his kingdom 
was then seen to be not of this world, many of the 
people and some of the nobles believed. That they 
believed in Jesus then accords with his own decla- 
ration that his Death and Resurrection was the 
great sign of his Messiahship. Had it not been for 
that belief, our Lord's claim to be the Messiah would 
have been so rejected by his own countrymen as to 
be an almost unanswerable argument against that 
claim. There was no such rejection. In his own 
day and generation there were enough of his own 
countrymen (even those men and women who spread 
his Gospel throughout the world) to bear sufficient 
testimony that he was the Messiah whom their 
prophets foretold. 

Still, the condemnation of Christ to death was a 
national crime. The nobles presented the question 
suddenly to the people, they left them no time for 
reflection, but they did persuade them to reject 
Jesus ; and the common outcries of them all drove 
the Roman Governor to order His crucifixion. 

* In the earlier Gospels these classes are quite distinct, and so, 
too, in the last, though in that Gospel, written after the ruin of the 
nation, they are all spoken of as the Jews. 



THE RULING CLASS IN JUDEA. 259 

Caiaphas was high-priest that year ; he was a 
Sadducee, and then, as for sometime before and 
afterward, the office of high-priest was in the hands 
of a powerful Sadducean family. But in all the 
Gospels the Pharisees are the earliest, the most 
bitter, and for a time the only active enemies of 
Jesus ; they seek for, they contrive, and they bring 
about His death. It was their work, although they 
secured his arrest and his crucifixion at the hands 
of the Romans through the powerful and ready aid 
of the Sadducees, and with the assent of the Hero- 
dians and of the people. 

The inquiry, then, into the causes of the danger 
that was ever near the Messiah in Judea — causes other 
than the sinfulness common to man — is an inquiry 
into the causes of the hatred of the governing class 
in Judea toward Jesus. In the eyes of those aris- 
tocrats their welfare was bound up with the estab- 
lished order of things. They could see no change 
that would benefit themselves. To them the Mes- 
siah's coming was the unphilosophic illusion of un- 
cultured people. They had no faith in the Christ, 
but they had faith in the fortune of Rome. They 
feared that the belief of the people in the Messiah 
would lead to rebellion, and they measured too 
well the Roman strength to believe in the success 
of that rebellion. In such a war they knew they 
would lose their power. They loved power even 
more than they loved money, and in that war they 
would lose both. They took no pay for their relig- 
ious ministrations — as the nobles and gentry who 
sit in the House of Lords or Commons take none 



260 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

for their services — yet through their ministrations 
they gained and kept the favor and the reverence 
of the people, reached their whole life, controlled 
their affairs, and held all the offices. Thus indi- 
rectly wealth came to them from religion, which 
was their trade, and woe to him who endangered 
their trade. For spiritual blessings they cared lit- 
tle, and believed little in them, though they were 
full of the proselyting zeal that is common with 
those with whom the forms of religion take the 
place of the realities of religion. They studied the 
laws of Moses for their own ends ; they enforced, 
they redoubled his requirements with a zeal that 
was equal to their selfishness. A revival of relig- 
ion, such as the Baptist preached, would run into 
political changes, and from a love of their own in- 
terests, which they mistook for a sense of duty, they 
were opposed to all changes. Whatever flashes of 
light, whatever convictions of sin, smote them in 
their course toward Jesus, they thought they were 
doing right. Selfishness took on the guise of pa- 
triotism, and patriotism took on the guise of relig- 
ion. To them reform meant ruin. Their ruin was 
the ruin of Church and State. Without them the 
Church and the State would have no stability or grace, 
for they were the Church and they were the State. 
All aristocracies hate those who endanger their pow- 
er; but all there has elsewhere been of that hate is a 
shadow compared with the hatred with which the re- 
ligious and political aristocracy of the Jews sought 
the lives of the murdered Baptist and of the cruci- 
fied Son of Man. Yet at times they seemed to 



TESTING THE FITNESS OF JUDEA. 26 1 

have been haunted by a presentiment of the ruin 
their vengeance would bring upon themselves, and 
in their near judgment their Church and State per- 
ished, and they perished with them. 

The preaching of the Baptist aroused the watch- 
ful jealousy of the Pharisees, and even without this 
stimulus, such was the state of things that the min- 
istry of Jesus in Judea would have been a perilous 
one. In His life some outshinings of his omnis- 
cience witnessed to his true divinity ; yet he did 
not avail himself of his omniscience in lieu of his 
human foresight. Murder haunted his footsteps 
from Nazareth to Calvary, yet he guarded against 
danger (for the most part at least) by prudence and 
forethought. Growing to manhood and living in 
Galilee, He had small means of judging of the fitness 
or unfitness of Jerusalem and Judea to become the 
chief field of his ministry. He had to test that ; 
and while the continuing proclamation of his Herald 
kept the common eye fixed upon the Baptist, there 
was a comparatively safe opportunity for Jesus to 
make the test which he made in that part of his life 
omitted by the other Evangelists, and described in 
the first four chapters of St. John. 

In some real and true sense the ministry of the 
Redeemer was ever going on from_the hour of con- 
secration at his baptism ;* still it is a question on 
the answer to which, at one important point, de- 

*Of the forty days only the supernatural is made known; yet it 
seems probable that in his meditations in the solitude of the desert 
the principles that were to guide his course were fixed before his 
decisions were tested. 



262 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

pends the harmony of the earlier Gospels and the 
last Gospel — Was there any moment before the im- 
prisonment of John that, in every respect, answers 
to the idea that it was the beginning of the fullness 
of His public ministry? Such was the privacy of 
the baptism that it does not perfectly answer to the 
idea of that beginning ; neither does the temptation 
in the solitude of the wilderness. It only remains 
to consider whether the course of events described 
only by St. John fully answers to it ; and I think 
that in those events, and in the way in which they 
are told, we shall find evidence that they were pre- 
paratory to the fullness of our Lord's ministry, 
which, in the other Gospels, dates from the Bap- 
tist's imprisonment. 

When the Messiah came up out of the desert he 
began at once to provide for a witness to himself; 
but that calling of Simon, John, Andrew, Philip, 
and Nathanael, though an official act, was hardly a 
public one. Jesus there began to form his band of 
disciples, but its organization was afterward com- 
pleted in Galilee, where a later and more emphatic 
summons was the true beginning of the discipleship. 

Sent for, no doubt, by his mother, and attended 
by the five, (whom St. John naturally speaks of 
then as disciples,) Jesus came to a gathering of his 
family at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The family, 
as truly as the Church or the State, is ordained of 
God, with inviolable rights and holy ministrations 
of its own. The presence of the Lord at that wed- 
ding was the Messianic reconsecration of the family. 
There our Lord wrought his first miracle ; but, 



THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE. 263 

though it has peculiar glories, it was a household 
miracle ; it was wrought in and for a family ; it was 
long before it was made known in the written Gos- 
pel ; and, therefore, the mind is left free to seek for 
some other hour as that of the fullness of our Lord's 
ministry. 

From Cana He soon went up to Jerusalem, and 
there he cleansed the unholy Temple. No act 
more public, few more significant ! It was well re- 
membered, and His words rankled in the hearts of 
those who heard them till they wrought mightily 
toward his own death. Yet the cleansing of the 
Temple, I hardly know why, has not impressed me 
— I do not know that it has impressed any one — 
as that full beginning of our Lord's ministry that 
makes all other beginnings preparatory to itself. 
But I do see it was not the manifestation of the 
Messiah then, that it is now. In the Man before 
them no astonished priest or citizen then recognized 
that Child whom long years before the Magi came 
from the Far-East to find. That Child was mur- 
dered with the boys of Bethlehem ! The other 
signs at the birth of Jesus had been hidden away 
in the hearts of the pious few who witnessed them, 
or of the few to whom they could be safely told ; 
for the birth of an heir to the throne of David was 
a dangerous secret. Of those few the old were 
dead. A quarter of a century had gone, and much 
had come between. The cry of the Baptist was 
heard in the land, but there was nothing to connect 
his proclamation with this Stranger. His act, then, 
was not so rash as it seems. Outbreaks of religious 



264 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

zeal are common in the East ; and this deed was 
done before the rulers knew it. The Pharisees 
made popularity a profession, and there was some- 
thing in the deed that would please the people, one 
of whom the Stranger seemed to be. What our Lord 
did was of less public consequence at the time than it 
seems to us now, and it hardly answers to the idea 
of the true beginning of His public ministry. 

Still it was an assertion of sovereignty over the 
Temple which should have prevented any one from 
saying that our Lord gradually formed an idea of 
his mission, changing and enlarging it as time went 
on. This fatal error is forbidden by His words in 
the Temple while yet a youth obedient to his par- 
ents, and again by what is recorded here. Though 
He was then looking into the way of carrying out 
his mission, it proves that in his own mind he had 
determined what his mission was ; and the reason 
for the act itself may, in part, have been, that no 
reasonable doubt on that point should ever arise. 
It stands out almost in the way of contrast to the 
course ©f events in which it occurred. Still it does 
not destroy its tentative preparatory character. 
There is nothing of that color in any thing that is 
told of the life of Christ after the imprisonment of 
John, and there is something of that color in all that 
came before it. 

I do not think that Nicodemus for his own sake 
feared to come to Jesus by day, but because that 
what our Lord did and said in the Temple had 
aroused a feeling in the strong men of Jerusalem 
that would have been perilous to the Stranger, but 



THE SILENCE OF ST. JOHN. 265 

for his seeming insignificance and loneliness. The 
Jewish ruler does not speak as if he were ashamed 
of coming ; and had he come by night from cow- 
ardice he would not have been welcome, for cowards 
are not wanted in the kingdom of heaven. 

This nobleman speaks of miracles wrought at 
that time : " No man can do these miracles which 
Thou doest except God be with him." St. John be- 
held those miracles, but he does not describe one of 
them. Now, we are studying writings of artless sim- 
plicity yet of unfathomed mental power, in whose 
pages there are plain indications of careful thought 
as to all that is written, signs of an intelligence in 
the selection, arrangement, and utterance of his facts, 
that ever more and more is disclosing itself, yet is 
not fully known to any man living, and for genera- 
tions, and it may be forever, will be more and more 
visible. This is the writing of so great a master of 
history that no other save his colleague, St. Matthew, 
is to be named with him ; and any one looking at 
what is here written must see that St. John would 
have altered the whole coloring of this course of 
events if he had described a single one of those mir- 
acles as minutely as he afterward described that of 
the beggar blind from his birth. And, further, it 
agrees with the view that has been taken of this 
course of events, that when St. John says that 
" many believed on his name when they saw the 
miracles which he did," he goes on to say, " but 
Jesus did not commit himself unto them." 

Out from walled and guarded Jerusalem Jesus 
went into the open country. There He " tarried, 



266 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

all men came unto him," and his disciples bap- 
tized. Now, if all these things — the cleansing of 
the temple, miracles in the city, the gathering in 
the country — did not constitute a full beginning of 
Christ's ministry, what could ? There is force in 
the question ; but the doings of the heir-apparent 
to a vacant throne are of kingly significance and of 
public moment before he becomes, at his coronation, 
in the full sense, a king. The continuing of the 
Herald to proclaim the coming of the King, forbids 
the otherwise certain inference from this train of 
facts ; and it is some confirmation of this that up to 
this time the disciples of Jesus baptized, but in our 
Lord's full ministry they never baptized. 

We come now to almost the last of the facts that 
bear on the question, whose answer we have been 
so long journeying to find — following the winding 
road, and turning into other paths. " John was 
baptizing near to Salim, because there was much 
water there, for John was not yet cast i?ito prison. 
The Evangelists were not writers by profession, 
and what they say to clear up things is sometimes 
thrown in so abruptly and so briefly as of itself to 
need clearing up. Here it looks as if one stupid 
scribe wrote that last line in the margin of his copy 
and another let it slip into the text ; for if John was 
baptizing, it seems needless to say that he was out 
of prison ; but for that line there is a good reason. 
The verse before states a fact, this one gives a date, 
and it is natural to suppose that just here the need 
of that date occurring to St. John, he named it in 
the quick way that he would have done in conver- 



DATE OF THE MINISTRY. 267 

sation. As the date of the Fullness of the Ministry 
given in the other Gospels, it was well known to all 
the Christian congregation — hence St. John's brief 
way of speaking; and his recognition of it gives to 
all he before related its true character of a prepara- 
tion for that epoch. 

The Baptist's last testimony follows that line 
almost immediately. A Jew set on his disciples to 
make the Baptist jealous by telling him of the 
crowds that came to Jesus ; a way of working mis- 
chief that never would have been thought of had 
our Lord's course of action up to that time clearly 
brought out the breadth of the difference between 
Himself and the Baptist. Surely John could not 
but have known that of which his disciples spoke 
to him, and it was hardly a temptation to one to 
whom Christ Jesus had been revealed as " the 
Word made flesh ; " yet such is the frailty of man 
that the quietude, the humility, the meek unself- 
ishness with which he answered his disciples is 
truly touching in a man of so fiery and high a na- 
ture ; and it may have been that because of this vic- 
tory over himself in that good hour the Spirit of God 
so touched his soul that his utterance became one 
of the marvels of prophecy. Then was the glory of 
the Eternal Word so revealed that many believe 
that the witness of the inspired Apostle here joins 
with that of the Baptist ; and when the soul of the 
Baptist's aged disciple stirred within him as he gave 
more than wonted power to the words of his old 
Master by writing them out, he may have carried 
on their line of thought. If he did, he also spake 



268 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

as he was moved by the Holy Ghost — but in the 
months at ^Enon John was near to Jesus ; he had 
time for communion with his Lord ; and as the Lord 
made such revelations to the Jewish ruler, what 
may he not have revealed to the son of his moth- 
er's kinswoman, to the child of Elisabeth, born in a 
prophetic hour, and, perhaps, more to him than any 
other man ! 

In his last testimony to Christ Jesus, just before 
his imprisonment, the Baptist said, " He must in- 
crease, but I must decrease ;" and though there is 
nothing decisive in the words, yet they do sound 
as if he had a presentiment of the near close of his 
own ministry and of the Fullness of the Ministry 
of his Lord. 

I find that the last Evangelist does not give the 
same reason for our Lord's departure from Galilee 
that the others give; still his reason does not clash 
with theirs; it is additional, and rounds out the 
harmony of the earliest and of the last Gospel as 
to the evil of those days. Some one (we know not 
whom — Nicodemus, possibly, or one of those for 
whom the unrecorded miracles were wrought in 
Jerusalem) sent to Jesus a word of warning; and 
when he knew that the Pharisees had heard that 
his following outnumbered that of the Baptist He 
left the province of Judea. 

The hatred of the Pharisees for the Baptist, seen 
in this warning, looks a little as if they had some- 
thing to do with his imprisonment ; but St. Mat- 
thew and St. Mark give, as the cause, his rebuke 
of Herod for marrying his brother Philip's wife. 



HEROD ANTIPAS AND THE PREACHER. 269 

Josephus says that John was put to death because 
Herod feared his influence with the people ; yet the 
history is consistent. It is rather strange that the 
Tyrant for awhile " heard John gladly, and did 
many things " at his bidding ; but Oriental rulers 
(and all who have mastered the art of ruling) give a 
politic show of honor to those whom the people 
" count as prophets." Herod Antipas was a tiger's 
cub, but he had the craft of the fox. The honest 
Preacher thought too well of the man ; and yet 
there was dramatic propriety in his rebuke of the 
wantonness of Herod. The fire of the old Prophets 
kindled up as it went out forever. The last of that 
king-defying race spoke out as bold as any. He 
made a deadly enemy of the woman the king lived 
with ; but her wrath was not the sole reason for his 
laying hands on John. It was one reason, and it 
was politic for the king to give it out as the only 
one, for then some would say the Preacher had 
meddled with what was no concern of his, and the 
people would resent his fate less than if its cause 
had been a political one. The familiarity of Jose- 
phus with the Herodian princes made it inconven- 
ient to give all of Herod's reasons, but he is right 
as to the one he does give. The Reformer's popu- 
larity troubled the tyrant. The gatherings to his 
field-preaching and his proclamation of the Mes- 
siah's coming were dangerous. Herod felt this, 
but it was his nature to drift. His fear of the 
people tended to make him lay hands on the 
Preacher, and also to let him alone. He was curi- 
ous to see him, he wished to get him in his power, 



270 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

and he sent for the holy man. He felt his good- 
ness, he was moved by his eloquence, and he list- 
ened with patronizing condescension. But there 
was no real conviction of sin in his languid nature. 
In sudden anger he took the first step toward mak- 
ing way with the Preacher, but he was not old 
Herod's son if he did not think of it before. The 
drunken revel, the dancing Herodias, and her Jeze- 
bel of a mother made his crime a public one; but if 
things had not been as they were the murder would 
have come — a prison is but a prophet's resting-place 
on his way to the grave. 

The Evangelists were not likely to have known 
of Herod's secret motives. Herod needed no 
prompting of the Pharisees ; but they feared, hated, 
and watched the Preacher, and the warning sent to 
Jesus rather looks as if they had something to do 
with the fate of the Baptist ; but if they had, it was 
one of their dark secrets, and suspicion of it, at the 
time, was hindered by the apparent reasons for the 
imprisonment and murder. Tidings of the favor of 
Jesus with the people smote the Pharisees just when 
they learned that the Reformer would trouble them 
no more, (for they knew he would never come out 
of his prison alive.) In their exulting they heard 
there was more danger from Jesus than there had 
been from John. At such a moment, in such a 
mood, they may have planned a like fate for him. 
Whatever their evil design, it was known to some 
one, who sent Jesus a word of warning, and his in- 
stant flight shows the warning was timely and sure. 
Here, for the moment, the two elect Evangelists 



THE WARNING SENT TO JESUS. 27 1 

are on common ground, but the warning is named 
only by St. John. He may have seen the runner 
who brought it ; he could not forget it, for he fled 
with his Master. Far to the north, St. Matthew 
was busy, that day, in the custom-house, and could 
not have heard of the warning until afterward : and 
had he spoken of it, it might have seemed that the 
course of Jesus was determined by it, rather than 
by general reasons. Yet the stronger reason — the 
imprisonment of John — given by the earliest Evan- 
gelists for our Lord's quitting Judea agrees with 
the immediate reason given by the last Evangelist. 
Having their Gospels before him, St. John cleared 
up what was not entirely clear in them (since Her- 
od's' anger with the Baptist did not directly imperil 
Jesus, and in Galilee He was within his dominions) 
by recording the warning, which shows that such a 
crisis had come that Jesus could no longer safely 
stay in Judea. 

Again, by way of clearing up things, St. John 
throws in a line, " He must needs go through Sa- 
maria," which soon becomes more clear when we 
are told that " the Jews have no dealings with the 
Samaritans." The former line emphasizes the ur- 
gency of the flight. Jesus shunned the more com- 
mon road across the river, which his enemies would 
think he had taken when they missed him, and 
went through the alien land. But His peril was not 
on his journey only. The danger was so nigh that 
He had no time, before starting, to procure the 
food that Syrian travelers must needs take with 
them. 



272 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

There was, then, a dark background of dangers 
past to the scene, when, wearied with His journey, 
Jesus sat on the well of Samaria and his disciples 
were gone to buy meat. What then took place 
passes my limits ; yet as what preceded throws some 
light upon it, it may be permitted to include it 
within them, though I see but as in a glass darkly 
the verisimilitude of that scene, and cannot hope to 
make what is only partially clear to myself wholly 
so to others. What is told is barely within the 
elastic bounds of possibility, and were it not for 
that little-noticed word of warning its verisimilitude 
might baffle us wholly. 

How could that announcement of our Lord's 
Messiahship, never before made in terms so clear, 
have been made to that woman ? The credence 
she gave to it goes far to show its wisdom ; but 
then, again, hardly less strange than His confiding, 
is that faith of hers ! His insight into the secrets 
of her life carried with it (as in the case of Nathan- 
ael) a peculiar power to convince ; yet how many 
beheld great miracles of the Lord and did not be- 
lieve ! And then the guise in which He came ! 
That tired-out traveler on foot, unarmed and un- 
attended by any royal company, hardly seemed a 
king ! 

There have been ages (as their images and pict- 
ures show) when it was thought there was no come- 
liness in the person of Jesus, but the majesty of his 
presence was never doubted. Once it struck fear 
into the hearts of his own Disciples ; once his ene- 
mies fell to the ground before it ; and there may, 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 273 

there must, have been something of unearthly maj- 
esty in his look when he told the woman who He 
was. That he told this to her is passing strange ! 
but deep is the mystery of human utterance ! The 
soul has its own times of speech and its own times 
of silence. The moments come when a man must 
speak, and moments come (as when Herod ques- 
tioned Jesus) when a man will not speak though he 
die ! The course of the Son of God, pre-ordained 
before the foundation of the world, had hardly be- 
gun, yet he was a hunted fugitive from the city and 
house of his Father ! He had taken refuge in Sa- 
maria, and his soul was stirred in no common way 
when there, by Jacob's well, he heard the woman's 
belief in the Messiah. Better than all others Christ 
knew the heart. She felt his truthfulness, and He 
knew that her heart was better than her life. Her 
own hard lot, the sin and misery of the weary 
world, had not driven her, as they have so many, 
to curse God and die. The very evil of the world 
had led her to hope for an intervention of God. 
She had been told that in his own good time He 
would straighten the world out, and this seemed to 
ner so needful to be done and so God-like to do, 
that she was sure that He would. Her words were 
no echo of the heartless talk of her time — had they 
been they would never have brought forth the re- 
sponse they did. There were few, even in Israel, in 
whom desire had so passed into hope and hope into 
assurance. To such a woman, at such a time, it is 
not strange that the Messiah said, " I that speak 

unto you am He." It is not so strange as that the 
18 



274 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

words could not then have been safely said in the 
Holy City ! Many strange things are true, and 
many strange things bring with them their own 
evidence. Such an interview it were impossible to 
have imagined. It is hard to bring it even within 
the bounds of possibility ! but these are self-authen- 
ticating words of the Son of God : " The hour com- 
eth, when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet 
at Jerusalem, worship the Father. But the hour 
cometh, and now is, when the true worshipers shall 
worship the Father in spirit and in truth ; for the 
Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit : 
and they that worship him must worship him in 
spirit and in truth." 



ST. JOHN AND THE EARLIER GOSPELS. 2?$ 




CHAPTER IV. 

ST. JOHN AND THE EARLIER GOSPELS. 

ATHANAEL'S confession, " Thou art the 
Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel," * 
which, doubtless, uttered the feeling of Peter, 
Andrew, James, and John, has been said to be at 
variance with the lower tone of the faith of the 
Disciples after a longer and larger knowledge of 
Jesus; yet how natural their feeling at that great 
hour of their lives ! Like all around them, they 
were wondering whether the Baptist himself were 
not the Messiah ; he pointed them to " the Lamb 
of God, who taketh away the sin of the world." 
What Jesus said to Nathanael and to the others 
confirmed the words of the Baptist, and for the mo- 
ment they fully believed. The first lighting up of 
faith, as of love, is with a vividness that afterward 
sinks and wavers, though, if it be a true light, it 
lives on till it burns with a steady flame. The ear- 
lier brightness, then, of the sudden light and its 
deadening for a time are true to human nature. 
The quickening of a seed is always a contrast to its 
slow and difficult growth, which, checked in some 
ways and carried forward in others, at last makes 

* Given only by St. John. See chap, iii, 29-50. 



276 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the plant become what the vanishing prophecy in 
its quickening foretold. 

All that is needed to give probability to so early 
a Confession of our Lord's Divinity is a clear in- 
sight into the belief of the spiritual in Israel con- 
cerning the Messiah ; but much of all that has been 
written, about the Jewish idea of the Messiah has 
utterly failed to mark that faith of the true Israel 
which was uttered in Nathanael's cry, "Thou art the 
Son of God ! " That faith of the Disciples was after- 
ward perplexed by the mystery of the two natures 
in Christ ; but this would hardly make a semblance 
of a variance here were it not further said that the 
earlier Evangelists know nothing of the earlier call, 
and St. John knows nothing of the later call. This 
disingenuous special pleading begs the question. 
That they do not give the earlier call, and that he 
does not give the later one, is explained by the con- 
struction of their Gospels, for they begin with the 
Full Ministry, and St. John with a train of events 
preparing for that Ministry. 

It is further said that two calls are unkistorical y 
and one or the other must be given up ; yet if a 
single look and word had made them leave all, this 
would have been denied as miraculous by those who 
now deny the more human course of events. And 
unhistorical y the talismanic word with these critics, 
is here brought in as usual ; for those intelligent of 
affairs know that if their calling was not wholly a 
miraculous one, there were several stages in the 
gathering of the Disciples before they left all, to go 
with the Nazarene. 



CONFESSIONS OF THE DISCIPLES. 277 

In his retrospect of the experience of the Disci- 
ples St. John recalls the sifting and testing mo- 
ment* after the Discourse in the Synagogue at 
Capernaum, when " many went back and walked 
no more with Jesus." The Confession of our Lord's 
Divinity then made by all of the Twelve goes as 
far as the later Confession at Caesarea Philippi, for 
our Lord then said to them all, " Will ye also go 
away?" and Simon Peter answered for them all: 
" Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure 
that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
But honest and true words may be spoken with so 
much more of intelligence and depth of feeling at 
one time than another as not to be the same. It 
is needless to say this to people of common obser- 
vation ; yet there is a need of it which justifies my 
having said that it is humiliating to contend with 
some of the criticism of the Holy Gospels that 
comes from the highest seats in the synagogue of 
criticism, for there are some who take the Confes- 
sion recorded by St. John to be the Great Confes- 
sion made at Caesarea Philippi. I will not go into 
reasons that should be apparent to every one why 
time, place, and subsequent events forbid this error, 
but content myself with marking (what one late 
effort f to confound the two does not notice at all) 

* See John vi, 60-71, and compare Matt, xvi, 16. 

\ Dr. Bernhard Weiss, on " The Day at Caesarea Philippi," in 
the " Princeton Review," January, 1879. This article, in other re- 
spects worthless, is of painful interest as showing how at this pres- 
ent instant German scholarship, even of a sanctimonious kind, trifles 
with the Gospels. This will appear from a few of the notions scat- 



278 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

how our Lord received the earlier Confession. I 
need not recall to my readers the joy with which He 
hailed the Confession at Csesarea Philippi ; it was 
utterly unlike the feeling with which he heard the 
earlier Confession. " Jesus answered them, Have 
I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a 
devil ? " Difficult questions can be raised as to 
this answer — it is often so with what is said at 
moments when great interests are at stake — but the 
difference in our Lord's feelings, when he rejected 
the earlier Confession and when he heard the ac- 
ceptable one at Caesarea Philippi, is so plain that in 
the attempt to confound the two the gates of hell 
cannot prevail. 

Of all the general or special efforts to discredit 
the Holy Gospels few are as effective as the aver- 

tered here and there throughout this elaborate affectation of research. 
The writer of what is known as Matthew's Gospel used St. Mark's 
as the groundwork of a Life of Christ, he also had an old apostolic 
document with a rich store of sayings, fragments of which appear, 
and also in the third Gospel. Later utterances have probably been 
added. The Confession at Csesarea Philippi is made up in part out 
of some things brought forward from chap, xi, 25, and anticipated 
from chap, xviii, 18. It is, however, a recasting from the old docu- 
ment, for the speaking of Simon Barjona indicates the Aramaic 
foundation of his authority. [It merely indicates St. Matthew's own 
Aramaic Gospel, translated by him into Greek.] There is more of 
this dream-talk, (though nothing that is really new,) such as fancy- 
ing the miracles of the feeding of the Five Thousand and of the 
Four Thousand may be the same miracle twice told in different ways. 
The opinions of such a mind can be right only by accident ; and how 
consistent they are is seen when having asserted his " unshaken con- 
fidence in the genuineness of St. John's Gospel," he afterward says, 
" St. John can make less claim than the others to complete and 
literal exactness," and thinks that he touched up and colored some 
of St. Peter's words. 



HARMONY OF THE GOSPELS. 279 

ment of a variance between the portraiture of the 
Lord in the earlier Gospels and the last. Two of 
the facts given as evidence of this variance — the 
style and manner of our Lord's teaching in some 
of the chapters of the last Gospel, and that there 
are no parables in that Gospel — have been admitted 
and explained ; but the weightier part of the evi- 
dence of the charge is in the assertion that the earlier 
Evangelists know not the truth with which St. John 
opens his Gospel, or, as one of the orthodox cau- 
tiously puts it, "had no well-defined idea of the 
nature of Christ." In some sense that is true, for 
the nature of Christ is a mystery that is beyond 
comprehension. No one would have been more 
quick to own this than St. John, for he beheld in 
heaven One who had a name written that no one 
knew but He himself, and his name was the Word 
of God. But that his idea of the Eternal Glory of 
Christ was at variance with that of the other Evan- 
gelists has already been disproved by the way he 
brings the Baptist into the prelude to his Gospel as 
a witness to what is there revealed. That error 
could not do the harm it does were it not for the 
tendency even of orthodox scholarship to underesti- 
mate the intelligence of the Holy Evangelists ; but 
surely the Evangelists ought to be presumed to 
know, surely they did know, all the bearings of 
what they wrote much better than their critics. 
St. Matthew closes his Gospel with truth in har- 
mony with that with which St. John opens his ; he 
also puts that truth in the forefront of his Gospel 
when he cites the prophecy that the name of the 



280 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

child of the Holy Virgin shall be Emmanuel — God 
with us. St. Matthew did not mean that Emman- 
uel would be one of the names of Christ Jesus, as 
he might have meant had he written that line in 
modern days. Both the Prophet Isaiah and the 
Evangelist had ideas as to names, which (though 
frequently appearing in the Scriptures) are now but 
little understood. In the beginning, the naming of 
things animate or inanimate tasked the thought of 
man, and it is commemorated in the Sacred Records. 
The primal sense of each name for things (a sense 
now for the most part forgotten) tried to sum up as 
far as could be done in a word all that was known 
of its nature.* The Hebrews remembered the orig- 
inal significance of naming, and the Prophet never 
thought of the name Emmanuel in the way we now 
think of a name. In no such way was the prophecy 
ever fulfilled. It was not a name for Jesus in the 
Holy Family. He was never known by that name, 
and the Prophet never thought he would be. St. 
Matthew, who never heard his Master called so, 
understood the prophecy as the Prophet meant it 
should be understood, and as it has always been 
understood by the Christian congregation. 

The general sense — far wiser as to the intent and 
meaning of Scripture than the scholastic mind — has 

* Related to this subject are the names of the Hebrews. In " The 
Divine Human" Dr. Tayler Lewis wrought out an original argu- 
ment for the truth of the Sacred Records from the recurrence in them 
of pious names given in a spirit of faith or prophecy. For this 
branch of the subject see Gen. v, 29; xvi, 11 ; xxvii, 36; Exod. 
xviii, 3, 4 ; 1 Sam. xxv, 25, with other scriptures, and, especially, 
compare Gen. v, 2, with Matt, i, 21. 



METHOD OF ST. JOHN. 28 1 

seized firm hold of the thought of the Prophet, 
and uses that name only as descriptive of the 
Divine Nature of Him who was born of the holy 
Virgin. It uses that name, Emmanuel, only in lyric 
outbursts of devotion. But the Christian heart has 
thus seized firm hold of the sense of the prophecy, 
more through the analogy of Scripture and fine sym- 
pathy with the truth, than through any thought of 
that Hebrew idea of the significance of naming, 
which often lights up Scripture with new light, as 
in the case just cited from the vision of St. John. 

To begin to apprehend the fullness and depth of 
the intelligence of the holy Evangelists, is to har- 
monize the revelation of the Being of the Lord in 
the earliest and in the last Gospels. Illustrations 
of this might be multiplied ; its importance should 
be insisted upon — but I have to leave this line of 
thought with merely asking, What idea of the nature 
of Christ Jesus a man of St. Matthew's intellect 
must have received from what the angel said to St. 
Joseph — He shall save his people from their sins ? 

Were we to give up our minds for the moment 
to that criticism of the Gospel of St. John which 
says it exalts Christ Jesus to a height which it did 
not enter into the minds of his brother Apostles to 
conceive of, and were then to read his Gospel for 
ourselves, we should be amazed to find the human 
nature of Christ there brought out (if that were 
possible) even more touchingly and forcibly than in 
the earlier Gospels — as at the well of Samaria or at 
the grave of Lazarus. We should find that the 
Gospel, said to give an idea of the glory of Christ 



282 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Jesus so transcending that in the other Gospels as 
to be at variance with it, brings out his divine na- 
ture — and truly this is a marvel — by laying an em- 
phasis on his human nature. In this the secret of 
St. John's method, like that of the color of the Old 
Masters, eludes us. It could be seized only by a 
man of the historic power of St. John, and the world- 
time may run out before such a man is born: yet 
this is plain — the effect comes in part from the con- 
viction of the witness, that whatever is seen or heard 
of Jesus reveals " the Eternal Life that was with the 
Father." St. John's conviction of that is so sincere, 
that having declared the fullness of the glory of 
Christ Jesus in the wonderful prelude to his Gospel, 
he does not go on to prolong and uphold that high 
note, by the voice from heaven at the Baptism, nor 
by the glory of his Transfiguration — great signs, of 
which St. Matthew tells — but he goes on to give a 
talk with a Jew by night, with a Samaritan woman 
at a well ! The revelations of the Divinity of Christ 
that from the opening of his Evangel we hoped for, 
do indeed come, but not in the guise we thought 
of! We look for marvels, we find these things and 
are content ! Truly John was of great faith, for, 
beginning his Gospel as he did, he feared not to go 
on with it thus ! And truly Jesus was the Son of 
God, truly his life breathed of Divinity in every act 
and word, when such comparatively human and 
humble moments are so in harmony with the open- 
ing of the last Gospel ! 

Long before St. John wrote the other Gospels 
were given, and after what they had revealed of the 



HARMONY OF THE GOSPELS. 283 

birth, the death, and the resurrection, St. John 
could at once say, " In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was 
God. He became flesh, and dwelt among us." 
After what the whole congregation had been told 
of Jesus, their knowledge was in harmony with 
those words. St. John felt this, or he never could 
have begun as he did. His utterance is not that 
of one who is saying something so new, so unex- 
pected, that it must surprise, startle, and confuse; 
it is that of one speaking to those in intelligent 
sympathy with himself. What then becomes of 
the pretense that the revelations of the glory of 
Jesus in the Gospel of St. John are at variance with 
those in the earlier Gospels? 

In that part of the life of our Lord described only 
by St. John, the human element of prudence comes 
out more fully than in the earlier Gospels. In the 
latter his ministry opens with no appearance of the 
forethought * that goes with well-ordered human 
affairs. In those Gospels the course of Jesus at its 
beginning seems raised above the needs and appli- 
ances of mortal wisdom. It was ordained that his 
people should thus have their first idea of Jesus as 
sent from God ; and this is ever their first idea, 
because the Gospels are read in the order in which 
they were written ; his Church by keeping them in 
their time-order ever perpetuating the teaching thus 
inwrought into their construction. Those Gospels 

* Save, perchance, such as may be thought to pertain to his medi- 
tations in the desert ; but that is a matter of conjecture ; concerning 
it there is nothing directly revealed. 



284 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

could not so decisively have given that true im- 
pression, had they not passed over the events in the 
life of Jesus from the Temptation to the imprison- 
ment of John ; for (as we have seen) there was in 
them something of a tentative and preparatory 
character. From the course of events described by 
St. John, we learn something more than we are told 
by St. Matthew and the others, of the wisdom with 
which Jesus went on his way amid the complica- 
tions, difficulties, and dangers of his human estate. 
Here, for the moment, the Evangelists, St. Matthew 
and St. John, exchange characters ; in the later 
Gospel our Lord enters upon his labors with more 
of the thoughtful caution befitting the Son of Man, 
in the earlier Gospel with more of the instant direct 
action of the Son of God ! 

Let us now mark another divinely ordained rela- 
tion between the construction of the three earlier 
Gospels and the last, that is of far greater moment. 
On comparing the two apostolic Gospels, we were 
struck with St. Matthew's having passed over the 
life of our Lord from the Temptation until the im- 
prisonment. The same course is taken by St. Mark 
and also by St. Luke. Neither of them speak of 
the Saviour's going up to Jerusalem until he went 
there to die. We have again and again considered 
the several reasons for this on its human side; now 
let us reverently mark, as its only sufficient, highest, 
and true reason, the ordaining will of God that, by 
this construction of the Gospels of his Son, the 
proper place should be given to the Sacrifice on 
Calvary. For this structure and sequence of the 



THE ONE GOING UP TO JERUSALEM. 285 

Gospels (though its reason has been little under- 
stood, and so has been little thought of) is by no 
means the least effectual of all the many ways in 
which the Bible gives to the Atonement its true 
place as the great central fact of Revelation. 

The Church of Christ has ever felt, and will ever 
feel, that, in some true sense, there was but one 
going up to Jerusalem ; and such was the feeling of 
the Saviour himself. This feeling comes out in a 
conversation with his brothers.* Taunting and 
tempting the Saviour, his brethren counseled him 
to go with the caravan of his enthusiastic followers 
that was about to move on from Galilee going up 
to the Feast of Tabernacles, and to " show himself 
openly " as the Messiah. They would then have 
had Him do what he afterward did when he entered 
Jerusalem in triumph — if triumph that funereal pro- 
cession can be called which he knew was leading on 
to his death on the cross. His brethren did not 
believe in Him ; their spirit was a mocking one ; 
yet they were curious to see what would come, and 
were ready to turn the event, if possible, to their 
own ends. Our Lord severely rebuked them. He 
said the world knew its own, and they could safely 
go up to Jerusalem at any time. He knew their 
thoughts ; he knew the future, unknown to them, 
and told them his " time " to go up had not come. 
He answered their thought, and said, " I go not 
up." They understood that he would not then go 

* See John, chap, vii, 1-14. From the words " I go not up yet to 
this feast," (ver. 9,) "yet" should be omitted, according to the best 
authority. 



286 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

up in the way they wished ; and he did not contra- 
dict himself, as they understood him, when, a few 
days after, in a different way from that in which 
they tempted him to go, he went " as it were in 
secret." He said, " I go not up," for to him there 
was but one going up to Jerusalem. To that thought, 
that feeling, that purpose of the Saviour, the will of 
God conformed the structure of the three earlier 
Gospels ; and the same Will ordained that those 
Gospels should forever be read before the last. 
Thus in those three Gospels, His Church — before 
hearing of those other goings up to Jerusalem that 
were of less consequence, and on which she looks 
with different feelings — thrice goes with her Saviour 
to Calvary in that one going up to Jerusalem to 
which Christ Jesus ever looked forward as the con- 
summation of that for which he came into the world ; 
for it is written that "God so loved the world that 
he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever be- 
lieveth in him should not perish but have everlast- 
ing life ; for God sent not his Son into the world 
to condemn the world ; but that the world through 
him might be saved." 



THE FIRST AND THE SECOND GOSPEL. 287 




J 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FIRST AND THE SECOND GOSPEL. 

"HY the four Gospels ? It has been strongly 
argued that the first was adapted to the 
Jews, the second to the Romans, the third 
to the Greeks, and the last to Christians. Only the 
last statement is correct ; for the characteristics of 
the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans did not so fill 
out the orb of human nature that, by speaking to 
each in turn, the truth could address the whole hu- 
man race. Each of the three earlier Gospels is su- 
perior to national peculiarities, and is adapted to 
sinners of every race and nation ; and each of the 
four Gospels so offers salvation to all the children 
of men that Greek, Roman, or Jew, barbarian, 
Scythian, bond or free, may be one in Christ. 

The Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were 
somewhat restricted to the cycle of facts in the oral 
teaching of the Apostles ; and the forms in which 
they cast their recitals were often molded by the 
living tradition which they tried to use and did use. 
Yet they used their own eyes as well as the eyes 
of others. They told from their own lips what they 
heard ; and, while the great purpose of each of the 
four Gospels is one and the same, each has a char- 
acter of its own. 



288 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

None seriously question that the Gospel of St. 
John and the " treatises " of St. Luke are the prod- 
ucts of individual minds. The evidence of the same 
fact as to St. Mark's Gospel is convincing, and so 
also as to the Gospel of St. Matthew. The unique 
structure of the earliest Gospel is more complicate 
than that of the others, yet the unity of its organic 
life is perfect as that of a cedar of Mount Lebanon. 
And in the end all infidel efforts to tear that Gos- 
pel to pieces will only result in making that Gospel 
appreciated intellectually as much as it has been 
spiritually appreciated. 

In each of the holy Gospels the mind of the 
writer can be traced, and the unity of each Gospel 
is strong ground from which to repel the attacks 
that are made upon their authorship. The unity 
of the whole Gospel is one of the many impregna- 
ble grounds from which to repel the assaults that 
are made upon the whole Gospel. Upon this 
ground we have already entered ; and we are now 
further to consider some of those correspondencies 
and affinities of the Gospels which give to the Evan- 
geliad the unity, not of a human work, but of a di- 
vine creation. 

It might be thought that St. Matthew and St. 
John would have so divided their joint work that 
one would have portrayed their Master as the Son 
of man and the other as the Son of God ; but no 
such vain attempt to treat of the two natures in 
Christ, apart from each other, could have been 
thought of by any Evangelist ; and yet St. Matthew 
sets forth Christ Jesus more in his relations with 



THE PURPOSE OF ST. MATTHEW. 289 

time, St. John more in his relations with eternity. 
The genius of St. Matthew was the more historic, 
that of St. John the more philosophic ; and though 
nothing is more philosophic than St. Matthew's 
plan, nothing is more historic than the filling out 
of the plan of St. John. Free scope was given to 
the genius of St. Matthew by his earlier coming 
into the field, and to St. John because the other 
Evangelists wrote before him. 

It was given to St. Matthew intelligently to pre- 
pare the way for the Gospel of St. John. It was 
also given to St. Mark and St. Luke to prepare its 
way ; and they did so as well, though they were less 
conscious of doing so. We learn something of 
these things from what we learn of the construction 
and character, the similarities and differences, of 
their Gospels ; and what it was given St. Matthew 
to do we are now to discover in the only way pos- 
sible — by finding out what he did. 

Some knowledge of the time in which Christ Je- 
sus lived is prerequisite to a knowledge of his life 
on earth ; and the earliest Evangelist gives more of 
this than those who came after him. From St. 
Mark's Gospel this historic element is, compara- 
tively, absent, evidently because St. Matthew wrote 
before him, for it was more needed in Rome than 
in Jerusalem. And as St. Matthew wrote primarily 
for his own countrymen, to whom such knowledge 
was common with himself, his giving it as he does 
shows his large comprehension of what was required 
of the earliest written Gospel. 

The reason why St. Matthew's historic gifts have 
19 



29O THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

not been more appreciated is simply this : he gives 
" the form and pressure of the time " so quickly 
and easily that he hardly seems to give it at all. 
Yet a truer and deeper insight into what was then 
going on, can be gained from his Gospel than from 
all the many elaborate treatises on the Jewish civ- 
ilization at that epoch. From them much may be 
learned of the two political and religious factions, 
parties, or sects of the Jews ; but in sincerity and 
depth this knowledge does not compare with that 
which St. Matthew makes an indestructible part of 
our own, when the Baptist, seeing the Pharisees and 
Sadducees, with fierce anger suddenly cries out, 
" O generation of vipers ! " St. Matthew brings our 
souls into magnetic contact with the vital points 
of the time when they touch the soul of St. John, 
for the life of his time throbs in the heart of a great 
man. Well St. Matthew knew the light he was 
letting in upon the inevitable course of events 
through the stern surprise, the withering contempt, 
of the " Who hath warned you to flee from the 
wrath to come?" From the walled city those 
hypocrites came out to snare the Preacher in the 
open country ; and through their reception by the 
Preacher all know — those who spell out the words 
as well as those who read the Greek — and St. Mat- 
thew meant all should know, the wickedness of the 
Pharisees and Sadducees. Through the Prophet's 
heart all feel, and St. Matthew meant that all 
should feel, that there is no good in them. Here 
the future is in the present, the end is in the begin- 
ning ! For when the Herald thus flings the gage 



ST. MATTHEW'S HISTORIC GIFT. 2QI 

of battle down, we know that a deadly fight with 
the evil powers in the land cannot be put off nor 
put aside ; that the battle is already begun ; that 
there can be neither conciliation, compromise, 
peace, nor truce ; that the war must be an open 
and bitter war to the end. 

St. Matthew so makes us feel what was then going 
on, that our sense of it is somewhat like our sense 
of what is now going on in our own world around 
us, the kind of knowledge we are all the time using 
in our daily life so readily and so unconsciously, 
that it seems almost as much a matter of feeling as 
of thought. Evidences of St. Matthew's historic 
power are in all he wrote, but I must be content 
with one more example of it. The threescore years 
and ten are not long enough to read all the books 
about the Jews, yet what could be learned by plod- 
ding through them all, that is of as much value as 
what cannot but be learned from one reading of the 
second chapter of St. Matthew ? There the wide- 
spread belief in the coming of the King of the Jews, 
apd the prophecy of his birth in Bethlehem, are so 
fastened in the memory that they never can be for- 
gotten. There the predicted sign of the Messiah's 
glory is seen in the heavens ; there the world-wide 
preparation for his coming is made known ; and the 
evil heart of the Jews is laid bare when Gentiles, 
from a land beyond that whence Abraham crossed 
over the Euphrates, tell that the Messiah is born, 
and " King Herod is troubled and all Jerusalem 
with him." Here again St. Matthew binds the end 
of his Gospel to its beginning ; for no wonder that 



292 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

outside of the gate of that same Jerusalem the King 
of the Jews was nailed to the cross ! 

The pioneer Evangelist had to bridge over the 
years between the older revelation and the new rev- 
elation, by proving that Moses and the Prophets 
had spoken of Christ. Besides this he had to carry 
on the line of his mission " to the lost sheep of the 
house of Israel," so that what, in the end, was 
openly to become a mission to the human race, 
might be seen to have had that breadth of intent 
from its beginning. As he had to record the rela- 
tions of Christ to the past, he also had to reveal the 
relations of Christ to the future ; the one by repeat- 
ing words of ancient prophecy, the other by recall- 
ing Christ's own prophetic words, which time would 
prove to be utterances of Him " by whom the time- 
worlds were made." All these things St. Matthew 
had to do, for all these things he did. 

Wonderful his carrying out of so varied and large 
a plan in so small a space ! Still more wonderful 
the power that made all there is in his Gospel sub- 
ordinate and tributary to its revelation of the Sav- 
iour ! The difference between his Gospel and any 
and all the fifty lives of Christ written in the last 
fifty years is incommensurable ; it is not a matter 
of degree but of quality ; the power of the Evan- 
gelist is of another kind. Some cry out that a mir- 
acle cannot be proved by witnesses no longer sub- 
ject to the questionings of curiosity, gone centuries 
ago to be forever with the Lord ; but St. Matthew's 
Gospel is a miracle whose evidence abides in itself. 

His Gospel prepared the way for the next. That 



ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL AND ST. LUKE'S. 293 

Gospel only sketched the historic back-ground that 
St. Matthew had so fully drawn, and it gave but 
little of the prophetic evidence that St. Matthew 
had so fully given. There Christ is seen in the sin- 
gleness of his majesty; and when its likeness of Him 
was combined with his likeness in the earlier Gos- 
pel, then the image of the Lord in the hearts of his 
people grew more life-like than before. 

To the second Gospel we will return, but, leaving 
it for the present, let us pass to the affinities of the 
third Gospel with the earliest one. And if we say 
that the mission of Christ is wider in St. Luke's 
Gospel, this is at once rebuked by St. Matthew's 
opening his with the coming of the Magi and clos- 
ing it with the words, " Go teach all nations." St. 
Matthew's idea of Christ's mission is as broad as 
St. Paul's, (even as his idea of Christ is as spiritual 
as St. John's,) but the earliest Gospel had fully and 
clearly to give His mission to the Hebrews. St. 
Matthew gave this once for all — not so that the 
Evangelists who came after him could wholly pass 
it over, but so that in St. Luke's later Gospel the 
reception of the fullness of the idea of the coming 
of Christ to all nations being less hindered by the 
idea of his coming to the Jews, St. Luke could pre- 
sent the world-wide view of Christ's mission better 
than himself. This difference between their Gos- 
pels is strikingly marked by St. Matthew's stop- 
ping when he had thus far quoted the prophecy of 
Isaiah concerning John the Baptist, " The voice of 
one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of 
the Lord, make his paths straight," while St. Luke 



294 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

goes on to quote this, " Every valley shall be filled 
and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, 
the crooked shall be made straight, the rough ways 
made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of 
God." The primitive congregations sharply felt the 
difference between the two Gospels ; it was an ele- 
ment in the discord as to Judaism which called out 
St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians ; but in the 
course of time the congregation so came to read the 
earlier Gospel in the light of the later Gospel that 
it hardly knew how much had been taken away from 
the force of " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel," by the blending in the mind 
of St. Matthew's Gospel with that of St. Luke. 

Along another line a difference may be traced, 
though more faintly, which further tends to make 
the third Gospel the complement of the first. There 
is a tone of solemnity and sadness in the earliest 
Gospel that borders upon sternness and severity. 
This was the true historic tone when St. Matthew 
was dealing with the evil of that evil time ; for, 
having left the malice and murder in the heart of 
Jerusalem to his colleague St. John, it was only 
thus that he could make the death of the Lord his- 
torically intelligible ; and even then the earlier Gos- 
pel at this point waits for the last. St. Matthew 
reveals the diabolism of the time in such a way 
that the end does not take us by surprise ; yet still 
a searching historical scrutiny finds that, because of 
the absence of some of the facts related by St. John, 
the catastrophe comes about in the first Gospel 
without any very obvious, immediate cause. This 



ST. MATTHEW'S GOSPEL AND ST. LUKE'S. 295 

is common to the three earlier Gospels ; and in this, 
their structure is divinely conformed to the mystery 
of the Atonement; for, even when all the visible 
links in the chain are supplied by St. John, the 
death of Christ is not historically intelligible. His- 
tory knows but inferentially of the Divine or the 
Satanic. It is not given to history to understand the 
Agony in the garden and the Death on the cross. 

What St. Matthew wrote is pervaded with a sense 
of the presence and power of the Prince of this 
world that is beyond human insight. St. Matthew 
shows nothing of the disposition of Tacitus to 
darken the shades because it suited his own nature ; 
yet he made it so plain that the desperate wicked- 
ness of the nation was ripening for judgment, that 
this needed not to appear with like fullness in the 
later Gospels ; and hence there is a difference be- 
tween his tone and St. Luke's. Yet there is no 
variance between them ; for, with even more full- 
ness, St. Luke recites that awful parable of the 
wicked husbandmen's cool, calculating, money- 
making treason and murder, where the hard daring 
of human guilt is represented as passing beyond the 
foreknowledge of the all-seeing Mind ! And the 
more thorough the comparison of the two Gospels 
the more the correspondence comes to light. Take, 
for example, the visit of the angels at the Nativity. 
The gentle shepherds beheld no merry throng of 
bright visitants coming down to the earth with 
songs of cheer. They beheld the host of the angels,* 

*St. Luke ii, 13 : "And suddenly there was with the angel a mul- 
titude of the heavenly host." The English term here gives the sense 



296 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the army of heaven drawn up in battle array above 
the manger of the holy Child ! Yet throughout, 
these Gospels preserve each its own characteristics. 
They stand in their right places in the great year of 
God's mercy in Christ. In the earlier Gospel there 
is more of the severity of winter ; in the later, there 
is more of the gladness of spring. 

When the three earlier Gospels are taken to- 
gether, then, the first Gospel is perfect through its 
relation to the kindred Gospels. They are perfect, 
not apart from each other, but through a unity that 
came from the same Spirit, leading each Evangelist 
to give to his Gospel a character of its own. The 
same is true of the Gospel of St. John; but what 
is further to be said of the dependence of the 
Gospel of the last Evangelist on that of his col- 
league and of the other two Evangelists must be 
put off until after we have considered the occasion 

of the Greek term. For host is used by the masters of our tongue 
either for an army in battle array or for an army in combat. Byron 
may be said to define the former use of the word in his line descrip- 
tive of the day at Marathon : 

The camp, the host, the fight, the conqueror's career. 

Scott uses the word in the other sense, when one of the two squires 
left to guard the lady on the hill overlooking Flodden Field, seeing 
Lord Marmion's banner waver in the fight, cries out : 

Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare, 
May say your beads and patter prayer, 
I gallop to the host. 

In the verse from St. Luke what is in the Greek word is exactly 
given in the English word ; and I cannot but say that I have some- 
times heard the attempt made to mend our admirable version of the 
Scriptures from the Greek, simply because there was not a compe- 
tent understanding of the force and meaning of the English of the 
translation. 



THE PURPOSE OF ST, MARK. 297 

and motive for St. Mark's Gospel and the origin of 
St. Luke's. 

When I turned from communing with the forma- 
tive Gospel of St. Matthew to think of how St. 
Mark must have felt when he read it, it seemed to 
me as natural as could be, that St. Mark wrote 
just what he did write. When he read the apos- 
tolic Gospel his admiration, his surprise, his won- 
der, must have been lost in amazement. Yet, as 
he thought over that marvelous creation, he must 
have felt strongly impelled to tell over again the 
things St. Matthew told, just as he had so often 
heard St. Peter tell them. I think this would be 
very clear if we could keep what we read in St. 
Matthew's descriptions apart from what we see in 
St. Peter's pictures ; but the two are so interblended 
in our memories that we have hardly an idea of 
how the narratives of the one gain from the touches 
of the other. But if that becomes fully apparent, 
then what St. Mark did seems to be the most nat- 
ural thing in the world. St. Peter's " son " knew 
his Gospel by heart, and the reading of St. Mat- 
thew's brought up to him many things that St. 
Peter had told him, in such a life-like way, that he 
almost felt as an eye-witness would. Now, though 
a story be well told, yet an eye-witness will tell that 
story all over again ; or if told too well for that to 
be thought of, how sure he is to touch up the pict- 
ure ! The reason of the impulse is not far to seek. 
Many things are left out by a good story-teller. He 
seizes upon the strong points, and is dramatic rather 
than pictorial ; for the very highest descriptive tal- 



298 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

ent knows what to leave out as well as what to 
put in. 

St. Matthew had the rare gift of seeing into, and 
of bringing to light, the soul of things ; but in por- 
traying their bodily form he was not so good. The 
highest descriptive talent is seldom found in com- 
pany with that lower excellence. In the latter St. 
Matthew was not deficient, and in the former he 
has no superior. My meaning will be clearer if we 
compare St. Matthew's portrait of the centurion 
with the almost dramatic scene in St. Luke's Gos- 
pel. In the later Gospel there files in the proces- 
sion of the elders. They proclaim that the centu- 
rion had built a synagogue ; and to commemorate 
that good work of a Roman suits as well the spirit 
of the third Gospel as to tell of the charity of the 
good Samaritan. Then files in the procession of 
the friends of the centurion, escorted by himself* 
with his men at arms. For all that double array of 

*Matt viii, 5-13; Luke vii, 1-10. Of the seeming difference in 
the two narratives as to the presence of the centurion, the explana- 
tion in most comments — facit per alium facit per se, what a man 
does by another he does himself — mistakes the facts. In both Gos- 
pels the words are those of the centurion in person. St. Luke says 
our Lord marveled at him. The difficulty is that the centurion 
sends the elders, sends his friends, but nothing is said of his coming 
himself. Prof. Sewell changes the translation thus: "The English 
version uses the word ' sent ' in connection with both parties. St. 
Luke used two different words — a-xEOTeikev in reference to the first 
party, but e-rre/LLipev in reference to the second. The former implies 
that the sender remained behind ; the latter has two meanings, 
(1,) to send a person under escort, (2,) to escort him. And we find 
that St. Luke tells us that when Jesus approached the house the 
centurion called out his soldiers and conducted his friends under an 
escort." 



THE ROMAN CENTURION. 299 

petitioners there was a reason. The officer was one 
of those few who, when they want a thing done, 
take all the means to have it done. And St. Luke's 
historically instructive description shows that the 
Roman was not sure the wonder-working Israelite 
would work a miracle for one of the heathen. To 
study the religious passions of hostile races was of 
the Roman military art. The officer knew there 
were difficulties in the way of Christ's doing what 
he wished to have done, and he smoothed the way 
with good sense and tact and Roman energy. He 
made his personal desire a matter of public concern ; 
and such was the pulse of Israel that we are not 
sure, if he had not done what he did, that Christ 
would have wrought the miracle. Certain it is that 
his forethought in putting forward the elders made 
the granting of his prayer consist much better with 
a prudent and wise regard to Christ's immediate 
purpose in his mission to Israel. St. Matthew knew 
and appreciated all that as well as St. Luke ; but 
that which touches him is the man. His eye is 
fastened on the centurion. His soul is fixed on the 
soul of the centurion, and he so fixes our souls on 
him that the mind (though we remember and ap- 
preciate St. Luke) will no more combine the two 
descriptions than it will combine two representa- 
tions of the same event, one in sculpture and one in 
painting. It chooses to keep St. Matthew's descrip- 
tion apart by itself. St. Matthew could not dwarf 
the centurion by bringing in what no one else could 
have left out, and what after him St. Luke brought 
in so well. His thoughts are so with the man that 



300 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

he has no thought for the elders or for what the 
elders said. He cannot divide the interest of the 
centurion's words with those of others. To him 
the centurion's words need no emphasis from the 
presence of his men-at-arms, for they breathe the 
soul of Rome. With true historic instinct he 
speaks of what he most deeply felt ; and the cen- 
turion speaks to us, he lives for us as he lived for 
him, because St. Matthew makes us feel just what 
he felt. And St. Matthew sees it all through his 
Master's eyes, feels it all as he felt it, for his Master 
" marveled at the centurion." 

" Lo " and " behold " are St. Matthew's charac- 
teristic words. They come in some thirty times, 
and (with the constant recurrence of the simple 
connective then) have rightly been thought to 
show the hand of an unpracticed writer, whose 
artless, child-like ways are not like those of rhetor- 
icians. Yet there is another side to this. Those 
words are the signs of the one, who in the converse 
of the Disciples with the Lord never said a word, 
yet was so wrapt a listener, that when it came to 
the writing out of what the Lord had said, the Dis- 
ciples turned to him. For St. Matthew caught up 
his use of those words from his Master's lips : " O 
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, behold," and, " Lo, I am 
with you alway." And as the quickness of St. 
Peter's will is felt in his characteristic word 
straightway, so the peculiarity of St. Matthew's 
nature is felt in his characteristic words. For wis- 
dom is the child of awe and wonder. The soul 
that is alive to a sense of the unseen and eternal is 



THE STYLE OF ST. PETER. JOI 

ever crying, Lo, and Behold, as it every-where 
marks in the visible things in time the passing 
signs of the power and wisdom of God. And, fur- 
ther, on looking into St. Matthew's use of his char- 
acteristic words we see that usually they either 
mark a train of events : " Behold, there came wise 
men from the East ;" or else they call upon the 
soul rather than the senses : " Behold, certain of 
the Pharisees said within themselves, This man 
blasphemeth." 

Some argue that the descriptions in the earliest 
Gospel could not have come from an eye-witness. 
Such dullness is almost incredible. St. Matthew 
paints for the mind where others paint for the eye. 
Where others would have told of what they had 
seen, he tells of what he felt. Thus the element 
of personal feeling is as really in his narrative as in 
theirs, and such description as his is not only per- 
sonal testimony, but personal testimony of the very 
highest kind. Yet St. Matthew's genius was more 
like that of a sculptor than of a painter. And in 
that pictorial power, but for some lack of which he 
would not have been the grand witness and great 
historian that he was, St. Peter excelled him. That 
gift of St. Peter's comes out in things small and great. 
With St. Peter things move fast. His characteristic 
word is straightway ;* it comes in some forty times 
or more. St. Peter is fond of diminutives ; he 

* In our version, sometimes translated " forthwith," which is well, 
sometimes " immediately," which is not so well ; and often as this 
word comes in, it were better always to have rendered it " straight- 
way." See Mark i, 29, 31. 



302 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

talks of the little fishes, the little dogs that ate the 
crumbs, the little maid, and even of a little ear.* 

St. Peter's words are strong. At the Baptism 
heaven was " rent /" the others say it was opened. 
His word is the one they all use '-when the veil of 
the Temple was rent asunder from the top to the 
bottom." Some fine descriptive touches are his 
alone, such as, Jesus sat upon the Mount of Olives, 
over against the Temple. And he alone marks that 
Caiaphas, before he questioned Christ, "stood up in 
the midst — came down from his high seat into the 
circle of the members of the Sanhedrim, thus mak- 
ing his act that of the whole court. But, then, St. 
Matthew also marks that Caiaphas stood up, and 
of the three Evangelists who record that great mo- 
ment he alone gives the oath : " I adjure thee by 
the living God that thou tell us whether thou be 
the Christ, the Son of God." 

St. Peter has many fine descriptive touches, as 
that Jesus, " rising up a great while before day, went 
out into a solitary place, and there prayed." Some- 
times his words very naturally tell more than they say: 
"All the city was gathered together at the door ;" 
and again, "It was noised abroad that He was in 
the house, and straightway many were gathered to- 
gether, insomuch that there was no room to receive 

* The ear of Malchus, which he smote off with his sword. (Mark 
xiv, 47.) He may have taken it up at a sign from his Master ; yet 
Peter's eye must have been quick to have marked at such a time 
that it was a little ear. But the word is used by the other Evan- 
gelists, and it may be that while scholars have taken it in a dim- 
inutive sense, it is merely a form of the word peculiar to Palestin- 
ian Greek. 



THE STYLE OF ST. PETER. 303 

them, no, not so much as about the door." What 
door ? what house ? It was Peter's own door, it 
was Peter's own house, that house in which the 
Master " took his wife's mother by the hand and 
lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she minis- 
tered unto them." / 

But each Gospel has descriptive touches of its 
own, and some of th<5se in the second Gospel are in 
the others. If Peter tells that the little maid awak- 
ened from the sleep of death was to " have some- 
thing to eat," so does Luke; and for once Luke 
becomes the more graphic and minute. In the 
second Gospel the wretched father beseeches Jesus 
(just after he came down from the holy mount) to 
help "my son;" in the third Gospel it is, "my son, 
my only child." Yet St. Peter alone tells that when 
the multitude then beheld Jesus "they were greatly 
amazed." This suggests what was beyond descrip- 
tion ; and what can it have been but that some- 
thing of the unearthly light of the Transfiguration 
lingered on His face, like the light on the face of 
Moses when he came from the mount where he had 
seen God ? 

Our Lord's manner of " looking around " so im- 
pressed St. Peter that he often speaks of it. " He 
looked round on the scribes with anger, being 
grieved for the hardness of their hearts ;" " He 
looked round about in the Temple." And it is 
only St. Peter who tells how Jesus, going to his 
death in Jerusalem, " went before them in the way." 
St. Matthew and St. Luke tell what Jesus said " in 
the way," but only St. Peter marks his manner as 



304 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

he went. It was not with " bowed head," as one 
writer has it ; it was not with the martial bearing of 
a general, as another writer has it ; both are wrong 
in describing what the Evangelists would not try- 
to describe. Something there was in the look of 
the Lord which mortal eyes had never seen ; and as 
St. Peter set us thinking how Christ looked when 
he came down from Mount Hermon, so here he 
does the like by saying that as Jesus " went before 
them in the way, his disciples were amazed, and as 
they followed him they were sore afraid!' 

My readers would do well to compare throughout 
the earlier with the second Gospel, and then they 
will feel the breadth of the difference between St. 
Matthew's descriptions and those of St. Peter; here 
a single paragraph must suffice to illustrate this. 
Any one would answer, and we might turn to the 
night when Jesus walked on the water, but that St. 
Peter is chary of speaking about himself;* and so 

* Save when he told of his denial of his Master (Mark xiv, 66-72) 
and of the fearful rebuke of himself, (viii, 32, 33.) There is a touch- 
ing exception to his reserve in what is found only in xvi, 7. The 
reticence of the second Gospel as to things pertaining to St. Peter 
accounts for its saying nothing of the miracle at his call, given in 
Luke v, I— II. The fact of this reticence shows the Apostle's close 
personal relation to the second Gospel. It is readily and fully 
proved by comparing its record of what was said at Csesarea Phil- 
ippi with the record in the Gospel of St. Matthew : " And Peter an- 
swereth and said unto him, Thou art the Christ." Mark viii, 29. 
"And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed 
art thou, Simon Bar-jona ; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it 
unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto 
thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my 
Church ; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I 



ST. MATTHEW AND ST. MARK COMPARED. 305 

let us turn to the stilling of the storm. The time 
of this miracle in the course of events is given in 
the second Gospel. In St. Matthew it comes into 
the two chapters following the Sermon on the 
Mount, which are made up of facts selected without 
regard to their time or place, for the purpose of 
portraying our Lord's general manner of life. The 
storm was in the night after the day of the terrible 
encounter with "the scribes from Jerusalem," who 
in Peter's house charged Jesus with casting out 
devils through " the Prince of the Devils." It was 
so busy a day that the Disciples " could not so 
much as eat bread." On that day Jesus began to 
teach the people in parables, a significant sign of 
the great change that had come over their hearts. 
At the end of that day our comparison begins.* 
" When Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he 
gave commandment to depart unto the other side." 
St. Peter marks the very hour : " That same day 
when even was come, he saith, Let us pass over 
to the other side, and when they had sent the mul- 
titude away they took him, as he was, in the ship." 
As he was is colloquial, and points to his being 
tired out ; it is a phrase which eye and voice inter- 
preted, and we are to remember how real, how liv- 

will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven ; and what- 
soever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and what- 
soever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Matt. 
xvi, 16-20. 

* See Matt, viii, 23-27 ; Mark iv, 36-41 ; Luke viii, 22-25 ; a l so 
Mark iii, 22, with Matt, xii, 38 ; xiii, 1-3 with Mark i, 3, and note 
in the fourth verse the words, "And the same day when even was 
come." 
20 



306 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

ing to St. Mark, tone and look and gesture made 
all that St. Peter told. 

Then comes a fisherman's touch — " there were 
with him other little ships." The la7idsman, taking 
no note of the fleet, thus goes on, " Behold, there 
arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that 
the ship was covered with waves " — the sailor thus, 
" There arose a great storm of wind, and the waves 
beat into the ship so that it began to fill ;" the lat- 
ter is the more seaman-like, but there is not much 
to choose. " He was asleep," says the publican ; 
the fisherman says, " He was in the hinder part of 
the ship asleep on a pillow " — his head lying on 
the steersman's leathern-covered bench. St. Mat- 
thew says, " They awoke him, saying, Lord, save us ; 
we perish;" the words St. Peter gives, (his own, 
perhaps, though more than one must have cried 
out,) mean that and more, " Master, carest thou not 
that we perish?" Then St. Matthew — " He arose, 
and rebuked the winds and the sea ; and there was 
a great calm ; " St. Peter — " He arose, and rebuked 
the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still, 
and the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." 
Then, verbally, they coincide ; the disciples saying, 
" What manner of man is this, that even the winds 
and the sea obey him?" St. Matthew brings in 
their words thus: "The men marveled and said" — 
but when St. Peter, recalling that moment, tells 
how " they feared greatly, and said one to another," 
we hear those frightened men whispering, and we 
see them shrinking from the Lord, while their eyes 
are fastened upon Him. 



OTHER MOTIVES OF ST. MARK. 307 

Yet, neither here nor anywhere in St. Mark's 
Gospel, is there a trace of any running counter to 
St. Matthew, or any wish to outvie him in descrip- 
tion. The storm is told by St. Luke also ; and a 
comparison of the three descriptions goes to show 
that, like St. Matthew, he came short of St. Peter's 
power of putting another in his own place. 

So natural was St. Mark's impulse to write out 
what St. Peter had so often told, that it almost 
seems as if he might have done so for his own 
pleasure ; but writing was not then the simple and 
easy thing it is now ; and as a few Latin words in- 
dicate that he wrote in Rome, so a few words of 
explanation — such as, " the Jews, except they wash 
their hands, eat not" — show that he had others 
besides his own countrymen in mind. 

Other motives, then, came to be associated with 
the originating, formative, leading motive, without 
which St. Mark would not have written. The order 
of time had been disregarded in the earlier part of 
St. Matthew's Gospel, and St. Mark gave the se- 
quence of events in the life of our Lord, by placing 
the parts or sections of St. Peter's Gospel in their 
time-order.* He also recorded the few things in 

* Papias says, that he was told by Presbyter John that St. Peter 
was wont to suit his teachings to the occasion, and did not set forth 
events in their order, and that St. Mark wrote them out in the same 
way. If ever the Presbyter did say just that, he may have thought 
the one fact must have been consequent upon the other ; but so far 
as the order of events in the second Gospel is concerned, this tradi- 
tion is worthless. Dr. Edward Robinson, whose sound judgment 
enabled him wisely to handle a learning in which no one surpassed 
him, prepared with his usual thoroughness and carefulness a Har- 
mony of the Gospels, the best, perhaps, that has ever been made ; 



308 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

St. Peter's oral teaching that were not in the earlier 
Gospel — such as the exquisite parable of the se- 
cretly growing seed ; the cure of a deaf and dumb 
man ; of a blind man at Bethsaida ; and he alone 
gives this word of the Lord, " The Sabbath was 
made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." 

St. Mark opens his Evangel with a few words 
from Isaiah, the chief, and Malachi, the last, of the 
Prophets ; with this he is content,* because St. Mat- 
thew had compared the life of Christ with Hebrew 
prophecy. His not giving the discourses of our 
Lord is only explicable in a similar way. This ab- 
sence of prophecies from his Gospel is evidence that 
its construction was determined by that of the earlier 
Gospel, and the absence of the discourses is further 
evidence of this ; while the absence of both more 
than doubles the power of this argument. 

St. Mark does give the Discourse on Mount 
Olivet, but this is an exception to his general rule. 
The awe-struck Disciples, who listened with wonder 
to that word of prophecy, could not have seen into 
all its depths ; for it is still giving out more and 
more of its meaning, and will continue to do so un- 
til all be fulfilled. St. Matthew was not one of the 
four who were with the Lord on Mount Olivet ; he 
wrote down its words from the lips of St. Andrew, 
St. James, or St. John, as they remembered them ; 
and St. Mark could not but think it best to give St. 

he tells us that, after having fixed upon that order of events in the 
Gospels that seemed to him certain or most probable, he found that 
this was the order of St. Mark's Gospel. 

* The later citation of prophecy, Mark xv, 28, found in our ver- 
sion, is not in the best manuscripts. 



WITNESS TO THE INCARNATION. 309 

Peter's version of it, in which, towards the close, 
there is something of the tone and cadence of the 
words as they came from the lips of the Lord. 

Though St. Mark's Gospel was to be read by the 
heathen, he says nothing of the coming of the Magi. 
Their witness to the Lord was of peculiar and thrill- 
ing interest to the whole Gentile world, yet, like St. 
Luke and St. John, he was content with what St. 
Matthew told. There is stronger confirmation of 
what has been said of the construction of St. Mark's 
Gospel, in its not directly revealing the Supernat- 
ural Birth of Christ — though its first line recalls this 
by the words, " The Son of God." * And all those 
who assert that St. Mark knows nothing of His 
supernatural origin are rebuked when, in the syna- 
gogue at Capernaum, one of the host of that Evil 
spirit, from whom this assertion now comes, cried 
out, " Jesus of Nazareth, I know thee who thou art, 
the Holy One of God ; " and again, when " in the 
country of the Gadarenes," a demon cried with a 
loud voice, " What have I to do with thee, Jesus, 
thou Son of the Most High God?" But in St. 
Mark's Gospel there is more than the witness of the 
lost to the nature of Christ. His own argument 
with the Pharisee is there : "Since David called 
me Lord, how am I his son?" And again: "The 
chief priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, 
saying, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? 

* Some careless scribe left those words out of some early manu- 
script, but no scribe would have put them in had not St. Mark writ- 
ten them. Their loss would be great ; but if a misjudging criticism 
succeeds in blotting them out of the sacred text, still they are not. 
essential to the proof of the Incarnation from the second Gospel. 



310 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Jesus said, I am ; and ye shall see the Son of man 
sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in 
the clouds of heaven." 

Both the intelligence and the faith of the Chris- 
tian congregation in giving equal honor to the sec- 
ond with the earlier Gospel are like that of the 
Apostles in their treatment of the evidence of the 
resurrection. Precious then as now, the mystery of 
the birth of the Lord ; yet they fearlessly welcomed 
the second Gospel, though in it nothing was directly 
said of that great fact; and the reason why they 
did, is not less instructive than plain. The second, 
like the other Gospels, proves that Jesus was the 
Son of God, though its argument is simpler than 
that of the other Gospels. Like St. Peter himself, 
it is rapid and direct ; and it has a peculiarly con- 
vincing power. For, like the Disciple whom Jesus 
loved, the disciple to whom the Father revealed the 
Divine nature of his Son proved the Incarnation by 
what he had heard and seen and known of the man 
Christ Jesus ; that is, by what Jesus was in Himself. 

Does, then, the Supernatural Birth of the Lord 
Jesus lose any of its evidence by the absence from 
the second or from the last Gospel of any direct 
revelation of that great fact? Not in the least; for 
it disparages not the revelations of it in the first and 
in the third Gospels to say that the evidence of the 
fact gains in strength when the chief Apostle and 
the beloved Disciple prove the divine nature of the 
Lord solely by what they had heard and seen of the 
man Christ Jesus. Their confidence in the suffi- 
ciency of that evidence breathes like confidence into 



WITNESS TO THE INCARNATION. 3II 

hearts willing to receive the truth ; and this spirit of 
St. Peter in his testimony to Christ Jesus is an ele- 
ment of power — as is St. Matthew's, when he offers 
only brief evidence of the Resurrection. 

St. John's argument is the same in kind with St. 
Peter's ; but when he wrote, the revelations of the 
blessed Mother in the third Gospel, as well as those 
of the angel to St. Joseph in the earliest Gospel, 
were known to the Church. The straightforward 
boldness and originality of St. Peter's argument 
was in accordance with his character, and became 
his rank. His soul is in his Gospel, and if any one 
would know something of the reasons why the dis- 
ciple whose steps faltered on the water, and who 
denied his Master, was chief of the apostles, let him 
read his Gospel with open heart and he may 
know. 

Those, like silly Matthew Arnold, who talk of 
the revelations of the Lord's Birth in the Holy 
Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, as legends, 
are condemned by the course of St. Peter and St. 
John, when they prove from what they had known 
of their Master, that in him there was the Divine 
Nature revealed by the Angel and by the Holy 
Virgin. The same kind of evidence of the Great 
Fact is given throughout the first and third Gos- 
pels ; while in the second Gospel, as in them, it is 
attested by the voice of God at the Baptism and at 
the Transfiguration ; and his voice from heaven is 
heard for a third time in the Gospel of St. John. 
Each of the Gospels, then, brings direct supernat- 
ural witness to the Supernatural Fact. One reason 



312 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

why the second and why the fourth Gospel did not 
bring in the witness of the Angel was that St. Mat- 
thew's Gospel had made it known throughout the 
Church ; and one of the reasons why that even the 
beloved Disciple, of whom the Lord Jesus, when 
He was dying on the Cross, said to His Mother, 
Behold thy son, and who from that hour took Her 
to his own home, did not bring in Her witness was, 
that it had every-where been proclaimed by the Gos- 
pel of St. Luke. Thus St. Peter and St. John were 
free to prove the Incarnation by what they person- 
ally had known of the man Christ Jesus; and they 
did so prove it that to deny the Incarnation is in 
fact to deny all that St. Peter and St. John tell of 
His life ; and to deny that is what those who wick- 
edly talk of the legend of his Birth have it in their 
hearts to do. 

In the second Gospel the Incarnation is every- 
where revealed — as when the wind went down, the 
sea was still, and the Disciples and the seamen whis- 
pered, What manner of man is this ? or when " Je- 
sus said, Son, thy sins are forgiven thee ; and there 
were certain of the Scribes reasoning in their hearts, 
Who can forgive sins but God only? and Jesus per- 
ceived in spirit that they so reasoned within them- 
selves, and said unto them, That ye may know that 
the Son of Man hath power to forgive sins, (then 
he saith to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, and he im- 
mediately arose." To strike out the Incarnation 
would be to strike out the second Gospel ! What 
then is to be said of the criticism which avers that 
the Incarnation is unknown to that Gospel ? Yet 



ST. PETER AND THE SECOND GOSPEL. 313 

like unto this in folly and sin is all the adverse criti- 
cism of the Holy Gospels.* 

All the Fathers who speak of the Construction 
of the Gospels, tell us that St. Mark wrote out St. 
Peter's Gospel. St. Jerome says that Paul took 
Titus with him as the blessed Peter did Mark, cujus 
Evangelium Petro narrante et Mo scribente composi- 
tum est, whose Gospel was composed, Peter dictat- 
ing and Mark writing. Even if this be taken as 
meaning no more than that St. Mark wrote what 
he heard from St. Peter, still the way of saying it 
shows how completely the idea that the second 
Gospel was St. Peter's Gospel had taken hold of 
St. Jerome. His opinion is of uncommon weight, 
for he was a translator of the Scriptures ; but here 
his words are given as a clear and forcible utterance 
of the common opinion of the Fathers. At an ear- 
lier time, Irenaeus says, that " Mark writing out 
the things that Peter said, delivered them to us;" 
and similar testimony from Presbyter John carries 
such witness back to the apostolic generation. 

Alford thinks that the Fathers testify to "a pri- 
vate unavowed influence," of which, personally, they 
could have known nothing ; that their witness is 
vague and inconsistent as to the nature and extent 
of that influence, and he rejects the " authorizing " 
of the second Gospel by St. Peter, because the fact 

* As when Ewald prints St. Matthew's Gospel in Jive different 
kinds of type to show the patchwork ! Each age looks back and 
sees barbarism, of which the ages before were unconscious. The 
ages to come will look back on this and say, Behold, the blood of 
the Vandals and the Goths still raging in the veins of the Ewalds 
and those of like propensity to destroy ! 



3 14 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

is not " apparent as it would have been had it ever 
existed." This painstaking scholar mistakes the 
nature and the value of the witness of the Fathers, 
as do all those who decry it as hearsay. The judg- 
ment of the Fathers as to the origin of the second 
Gospel was founded upon evidence that has not 
reached us, but which was satisfactory to them, and 
is to be respected as intelligent. There is nothing 
that contradicts their testimony, and it is upheld 
by all the facts in the case. That what they say is 
often casually said makes it none the less convinc- 
ing. It is a thing, of course, that their witness 
should vary as to some unimportant details of time, 
place, and circumstance ; and this is of no conse- 
quence. They leave no doubt of the great fact, 
that in their times the second Gospel was univers- 
ally held to be, substantially, the Gospel of St. 
Peter. Their witness to that fact is from personal 
knowledge, and not from hearsay. And St. Peter's 
sanction of the Gospel is sufficiently " apparent " 
from that belief. Without his sanction it is hard 
to see how it could have been received as it was ; 
and it is " apparent " that it never could have been 
so received without the sanction of some of the 
Apostles, so given as to lay a sure foundation for 
the common Christian belief in its origin and au- 
thority. In the days of the Fathers that belief found 
expression in all possible ways. Thus Tertullian 
said, that St. Mark's Gospel may be called that of 
St. Peter. Justin Martyr, quoting a fact found 
only in the second Gospel, says, This is written in 
the Memoirs (the Memorabilia) of St. Peter ; and 



ST. PETER AND THE SECOND GOSPEL. 31 5 

in repeatedly speaking of the second Gospel as St. 
Peter's, I have conformed to early Christian usage. 

One tradition says that St. Peter " neither en- 
couraged nor discouraged " his enthusiastic friend ; 
and such is the course that St. Peter would have 
been most likely to take at first, as he was among 
those who had named St. Matthew as one of the 
two apostolic Evangelists. St. Peter could not 
have wished to alter a word or line in the Gospel 
that St. Matthew wrote. No doubt he felt it was 
not in him to have done that work so well, and 
thankfully accepted that Gospel as the gift of God ; 
yet he may have felt that " his son " was right in 
thinking that he himself could have told some things 
in a more lifelike way than St. Matthew had told 
them, for he could. 

It is natural to think that St. Mark was not at 
once fully aware of how great a thing he was about 
to do, and that what he wished to undertake seemed 
too humble to be withstood by his teacher and 
guide. Certainly there was no thought of dispar- 
aging the excellence of the earlier apostolic Gospel, 
no idea that what Mark wrote would take its place, 
and it never did. 

It may also be supposed that at length they were 
led by the Spirit of God to see how great was the 
thing they were doing; for in his last Epistle St. 
Peter said that not only while he lived would he 
remind the Church of the things concerning the 
Lord Jesus, but that he "would endeavor that it 
might be able after his decease to have those things 
in remembrance." These words may have been 



316 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

meant to prepare the way for the second Gospel. 
His last Epistle was written not long before his 
death ; for the Lord Jesus Christ had showed him 
that "he must shortly put off his tabernacle ;" but 
there is some obscurity hanging over his martyr- 
dom, (sure as the fact is,) and I cannot but think 
that for a time that Epistle was somewhat hidden in 
that same obscurity; and also some of the facts that 
concerned the second Gospel. St. Peter knew that 
his death was nigh, but the sudden outbreak of the 
persecution in which he died may have been un- 
looked for. In that persecution both the pupil and 
the Master may have died. To me the breaking 
off of the second Gospel so near its end seems 
clearly to point to the death of St. Mark ; but tra- 
dition does not easily part with its heroes, and not 
knowing of the death of the " son " as certainly as 
that of his spiritual father, it wrought out for St. 
Mark a history in Alexandria, and at length carried 
his bones as triumphantly to the Cathedral of Ven- 
ice, as it did those of the Magi to the Cathedral of 
the Rhine. But if St. Mark was suddenly martyred 
in the persecution when St. Peter died, we have 
the reason for the imperfect form of his nearly 
completed Gospel ; and the obscurity of their fate 
may have also so gathered around St. Peter's last 
Epistle as to have been a reason why it was not at 
once received throughout the Christian world. 

Yet on thinking over what has here been written 
concerning the second Gospel, my reader may say, 
How does this making of the second Gospel such 
a mere telling over again of what St. Matthew told, 



THE SECOND GOSPEL. 317 

consist with its having, in virtue of its own worth, 
an equal place in our minds and hearts with the 
other Gospels ? The second Gospel is very much a 
telling over again of what is told in the first ; it is 
also plain that St. Matthew anticipated in his Gos- 
pel some things that otherwise would have been 
written by the Evangelists who came after him. He 
joined the New Covenant so firmly to the Old Cov- 
enant that there was little need for the later Evan- 
gelists to prove the harmony of the two. Yet, that 
Christ Jesus was the Messiah promised and prophe- 
sied was so vital a fact, (not to the Hebrews only, 
but to all nations,) that St. Mark's passing it over 
as he did can be accounted for only on the theory 
that has here been set forth as to the origin and 
construction of his Gospel. Often and long as I 
have thought of this theory in the years since the 
idea of it first came to me, I have never had a doubt 
of its correctness. The theory takes note of each 
peculiarity and characteristic of the second Gospel, 
and no other that I have met with attempts to ac- 
count for some of these. As said before, the sec- 
ond Gospel presents an image of Christ in the sin- 
gleness of His majesty, as he was enshrined in the 
heart of the great Apostle. This Gospel comes not 
short of those of the other Evangelists, (if it be law- 
ful to compare words of inspiration,) yet the earlier 
Gospel is the larger Gospel of the two, and St. Mat- 
thew was a greater writer than St. Peter. I dis- 
parage not the chief Apostle in saying so, for St. 
Peter thought so, or else he would have taken the 
office he helped to confer on St. Matthew. But 



318 THOUGHTS ON- THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

though St. Peter was not so great a writer he was a 
greater man. The greatest men are not the men 
who write, but the men who are written about, and 
to that greater class the Chief Apostle belonged. 

Thus far our inquiries have gone on much as if 
in planning and writing their Gospels the Evangelists 
had been as free in thought as if they were writing 
essays ; yet could there have been any scope for 
the play of their minds, since they state facts only? 
This should have been thought of before, and what 
is here said of it must be said in few words. The 
play of the historian's mind among his facts is one 
of the elements of his history. The Evangelists, 
more than historians, restrict themselves closely to 
facts ; but facts are many-sided things ; it takes 
more than one mind to see all the bearings of any 
given one of them, and, in the selection and recital 
of their facts, the play of the minds of the Evangel- 
ists comes in. 

Their style varies with the character of each, yet 
the truth, common to them all, gives harmony to 
this diversity. But the harmony of the Evangelists 
comes not only from the common truth, but from 
the common inspiration of them all ; and in the 
fore-ordering of all things, the facts that were to go 
into the Gospels were shaped to that end by the 
Divine Spirit, who wrought with the Evangelists in 
selecting and describing them. St. Matthew gave a 
world-wide breadth to the opening of his Gospel 
by choosing from all the facts at his command the 
Coming of the Magi — a wonder and sign in which 



THE GOSPEL FACTS ORDAINED. 319 

heathen were pointed and guided to the King of 
the Jews, by prophecy that was not Hebrew proph- 
ecy — by the Star and the miracle. Through those 
facts the Evangelist revealed that, in the Great 
Cycle of Time then closing, the mercy of God had 
reached all nations ; through those facts he prophe- 
sied that his mercy would reach all nations in the 
Great Cycle of Time then beginning; and through 
them he revealed in the world outside of Judea a 
preparation for the Gospel of the Divine Redeemer, 
to which history was afterward to bear witness. 
And thus he could at once give to his Gospel, 
(which he had to make the most Hebraic of all the 
Gospels,) world-wide breadth, because the Spirit of 
God, as far back as the Time-Cycle when Balaam 
prophesied, and as far back as when the stars were 
set in the heavens, looked to the use of those facts 
by his Evangelist. Into this one element in the 
mystery of the Divine constructive wisdom of the 
Evangeliad, from generation to generation human 
thought will see farther and wider and. deeper, but 
all the thought of man to the world's end will not 
make the whole of this knowledge its own. 



320 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE. 

IN the third Gospel (now to be considered) many 
of the facts in the first two Gospels are repeated 
for the third time. Speaking in a general way, it 
may be said that they are the cycle of facts that 
belonged to the oral apostolic Gospel. One reason 
why the facts of the earliest Gospel re-appear in the 
second has been fully given ; but for their third 
re-appearance there is a reason that reaches also 
to their repetition in the second Gospel. It was an 
axiom of Hebrew law* that it took more than one 
witness to prove a thing legally. By two or three 
witnesses facts are presented in various lights, and 
through a comparison of divers presentations their 
truth may become a matter of demonstration. This 
threefold repetition, then, of so much in the earlier 
Gospels, which is such a contrast to their chasms 
of silence, is to be ascribed to the Divine Spirit who 
watched over the forming of the Gospels ; for in this 
way their portraiture of the life of the Son of man 
and Son of God has a completeness to which hu- 

*The Lord names that Law. Matt, xviii, 16 ; John viii, 17, 18. 
The other Gospels note only one Demoniac at Gadara, one blind 
man at Jericho ; St. Matthew, in each case, marks two cures, (as 
also in ix, 27.) He heard His Master speak of the Law , possibly 
had it in mind when thrice showing the full legal proof of His Di- 
vinity ; and he alone marks the " two false witnesses." 



THE THREEFOLD REPETITION. 32 1 

man witness could have attained in no other way. 
And through this threefold repetition an evidence 
of their truth inheres in these records which is open 
to all — a kind of evidence that would have been en- 
tirely wanting had there been only one Evangelist, 
or had not the same facts been told over and over 
again. We should, then, put away from our minds 
the rationalistic notion that the Gospels are but the 
fruits of individual researches and inquiries, because 
they go over the same facts. So far from the repe- 
tition in the Gospels compelling us to believe that 
the Gospels belong merely to literature, it is one of 
the multitude of evidences of the more than human 
wisdom that is manifest throughout the sacred 
Scriptures. 

Such repetition almost disappears in the last Gos- 
pel ; for no evidence of the truth would avail for the 
salvation of those whose hearts reject the Saviour 
as he is revealed by the first, second, and third 
Evangelists. The last Gospel is for the family of 
the Saviour ; there, with love and reverence, they 
know their Redeemer's voice, and, with concen- 
trated emotion, hear his last words of peace and 
hope and heaven, because in the final Gospel the 
wisdom of the Holy Ghost changed the structure of 
Revelation so as to perfect their communion with 
their Saviour, Mediator, and Lord. 

The Gospel of St. Luke is limited to the Galilean 
cycle of events in much the same way as the first 
and second Gospels; and for this limitation, reasons 
have been given in what was said of the construc- 
tion of St. Matthew's Gospel and of that of the 
21 



322 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Gospels generally. But the origin of the third Gos- 
pel is not as clear as that of the first Gospel ; its 
motive is not as apparent as that of the second, and 
its affinities are not so close with the first. There 
is much in it that is not in the two earlier Gospels : 
the memoir of the holy Virgin, another version of 
the Sermon on the Mount, or of a sermon much the 
same but delivered at another time, a journey rich 
in parables and in works of mercy, (but few of which 
are in the earlier Gospels,) and still another version 
of the word on Mount Olivet. On looking into the 
bearing of this, I could not but suppose that the 
setting forth of this new material might have had 
much to do with the writing of this Gospel ; but if 
that were its leading motive, and if it were of the 
private character that its being addressed to The- 
ophilus might indicate, it is hard to see how it could 
have become of like authority with the apostolic 
Gospels, or with the one so closely related to St. 
Peter. 

The honor given to Gospels of the brethren has 
been noted as proving that they were written in the 
apostolic generation, and this proof remains in full 
force though the Fathers tell us that Mark wrote 
under St. Peter's eye, and Luke under the eye of 
St. Paul. It is true that the Fathers have not left 
so general a witness to the one fact as to the other, 
but the tone of those who name it is that of men 
speaking of things known to every one — as we 
speak of Jefferson's having written the Declaration 
of Independence. 

Irenaeus says that " the same things that St. Paul 



THE THIRD GOSPEL AND ST. PAUL. 323 

preached were written out by St. Luke/' * The 
oldest catalogue of the books of the New Testament 
(A. D. 180) states that the third Gospel bears the 
name of St. Luke, but is really that of St. Paul; and 
this is of peculiar weight, because it embodies the 
judgment of one who took such an interest in the 
history and origin of those books as to draw up that 
catalogue.f As before said, some have denied the 
witness of the Fathers to the origin of the second 
and third Gospels because they could have had no 
personal knowledge of the facts ; but, so far from 
this being an evidence of their sagacity, it shows 
how little thought they have given to the materi- 
als from which history is derived. None of the his- 
torians of Alexander the Great had any personal 
knowledge of him, they all lived later than his 
time ; and the rule of those critics would unsettle 
ancient history and discredit most of the modern 
historians. 

It might be divined from the second Gospel that 
it was in some way related to St. Peter, but it could 
not, in like manner, be divined that the third Gos- 
pel was related to St. Paul ; and as the idea could 
not have come from the Gospel itself, the Fathers 

* This, and similar language of other Fathers, is direct proof of 
much of that which has been said in this volume of the oral Gospels 
of the Apostles. 

f Known as the Muratorian, from the name of the scholar who, 
near the middle of the last century, found it in the Ambrosian Li- 
brary at Milan. It is reprinted in Westcott's valuable " History of 
the Canon." Its data is given approximately. And it should be 
stated that this is the case with the dates throughout this volume. 
They are for the convenience of the general reader, and usually 
point, not to the time when a person was born, but when he wrote. 



324 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

must have known of the fact from historical evi- 
dence. Their testimony to the origin of the second 
Gospel is of great consequence ; to the origin of the 
third it is indispensable. Without the fact which 
they hand down to us, we should not be able to 
find out how this Gospel did originate ; learning 
from them its origin, we can find much that con- 
firms their testimony. The torch of history in their 
hands so lights up its origin, that with what we 
know of the oral Gospel, the relations of St. Luke's 
Gospel to St. Paul's can be made clear. 

Only a miracle could have prevented the writing 
out of some of the oral Gospels of the Twelve Apos- 
tles. That only two of those Gospels were written 
out by Apostles came from their selecting two of 
their number for their Evangelists. How it came 
to pass (humanly speaking) that St. Mark wrote out 
St. Peter's Gospel has been explained ; and pres- 
ently it will be seen that St. Luke's writing out St. 
Paul's Gospel came, in part, from no less natural 
motives than those of St. Mark. 

Holding the fact that St. Luke's Gospel is in 
substance the Gospel of St. Paul, to be established 
by the witness of the Fathers, let us consider St. 
Luke's preface ; and, as this short preface is almost 
enigmatical, it may be best to state the conclusions, 
that, in connection with other facts, I think, may 
be drawn from it, before trying to prove them. 
St. Luke says that many had taken in hand to set 
forth in order a declaration of things believed as 
they were delivered by the Eye-witnesses ; that is, 
they had undertaken to write out in their time- 



ST. LUKE'S PREFACE. 325 

order the sections of the oral Gospel of the Twelve 
Apostles. Paul, the thirteenth Apostle, " born out 
of due time," was not an eye-witness of the Word, 
yet he also had an oral Gospel of his own, and St. 
Luke wrote out the sections of that Gospel in their 
proper order. 

St. Luke is not speaking (as commonly thought) 
of persons who had written a Gospel, but of those 
who had done a humbler work. Apparently he 
was not going to do over again what others had 
done, for if so, he would have said that he was not 
satisfied with their work ; but he does not say this 
either directly or indirectly. He could not find 
fault with them for trying to do what they did, (on 
any view of his meaning,) for he was about to do 
much the same. St. Luke does not say expressly 
that his knowledge came from the Eye-witnesses ; 
if that may be inferred, it may also be inferred that 
it came from some other source ; and on looking 
into his Gospel, what he says of his perfect knowl- 
edge " of all things from the very first " naturally 
connects itself with the latter inference, through 
the revelations made by the Holy Virgin. St. Luke 
wrote to Theophilus, " that he might know the cer- 
tainty " of what he had been taught, but what the 
Twelve Apostles delivered needed no confirmation ; 
and St. Luke's reciting this in its time-order 
would not have given it any confirmation. There 
are, then, insuperable objections to the common 
idea that St. Luke wrote out the Gospel of the 
Twelve ; and that idea must be given up, whether 
any thing better can be put in its place or not. 



26 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 



St. Paul's converts had learned St. Paul's oral 
Gospel in sections, which, unlike those of the Gos- 
pel of the Eye-witnesses, had not been set in their 
time-order; and, if we consider how Theophilus 
must have understood St. Luke's preface, its mean- 
ing becomes consistent with all the facts, and clear. 
St. Luke hints (and the word is used advisedly to 
express what he conveys to us, though his meaning 
was plain to Theophilus) at more than he says. 
He had " a full knowledge of all things " — so our 
version reads — but he means more than that ; the 
word he uses means that he had diligently inquired 
into (followed up) all things from the very first. 
At the time when he wrote some knowledge of the 
life of the Lord could have been gained from those 
who had " companied with the Disciples during the 
time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among 
them." The earlier chapters of his Gospel did not 
come from the Apostles ; his preface may consist 
with a purpose to combine what twelve Eye-wit- 
nesses had " delivered " with knowledge derived 
from others, or it may consist with a purpose to set 
forth either by itself; but Theophilus, who was fa- 
miliar with all the circumstances, would have un- 
derstood the allusion to the Gospel of the Twelve, 
and have been sure from St. Luke's having written 
out St. Paul's Gospel, that St. Luke meant that, in 
his judgment, the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles 
and of the Thirteenth Apostle were the same in 
spirit and in truth. And, further, from what we 
can learn or may reasonably conjecture of the his- 
tory of those times, I think we shall conclude that 



PAULINE ELEMENT IN LUKE'S GOSPEL. 327 

this was what St. Luke meant to convey, and what 
Theophilus gathered from his preface. And were 
we to accede to the notion of Ambrose and Origen 
that by Theophilus (a name that means lover of 
God) St. Luke, in a somewhat mystical oriental 
fashion, meant a Christian, still, the meaning of 
his preface would have been clear to St. Paul's con- 
verts, and through them to all the Christians at 
that time. 

Though the Fathers held St. Luke's Gospel to be 
the Gospel of St. Paul, critics, orthodox, quasi or- 
thodox, and infidel, have found no Pauline element 
in the third Gospel ; but, on the other hand, a 
school of critics have labored to prove that Luke 
was the partisan of Paul, and for his sake colored 
facts and invented facts as deftly as a political 
pamphleteer. This (Tubingen) school* is evidence 
of its kind (and with those courteous orthodox 
scholars who admire its industry, commend its 
learning, and, may Heaven preserve their own! 
who praise its good intentions, it should be strong 
evidence) of a close relation between what Paul 
preached and Luke wrote. 

On thinking of this question some may feel that 
the portrait St. Paul has unconsciously drawn of 
himself in his Epistles is not in harmony with the 
sweet and gentle spirit of St. Luke's Gospel — such 
should look at that portrait again. In the soul of 
St. Paul there was a feminine element, as there is 
in the souls of all heroic and noble men. He was 
earnest even to sternness, yet self-forgetting, and in 

* So called from the University of that name. 



328 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the depths of his nature there was the tenderness 
of a woman. 

Many, however, will deny (what thus far has been 
assumed, and which is essential to the proof that 
the third Gospel is substantially St. Paul's) that St. 
Paul taught a Gospel of his own. This denial was 
a reasonable one so long as the oral teaching of 
the twelve Apostles was not understood ; but as 
each of them had an oral Gospel of his own, and 
as the thirteenth Apostle was " not a whit behind 
the other Apostles," it follows that he had his own 
oral Gospel. Why not ? But to this question 
(which often may be put in lieu of a discussion) it 
will be answered, Because St. Paul was not one of 
the twelve Eye-witnesses. This fact, in part, has 
led to the common idea that by the term Gospel 
St. Paul always meant the Truth; but St. Paul 
used the word Gospel in two senses, in much the 
same way the word is used now. Sometimes he 
used it in its broad general sense; though with him 
and with the early Christians it never meant a sys- 
tem of theology, but was a name for the leading 
facts revealed concerning the Lord — was, in brief, 
Christ Jesus and him crucified ; and again, by his 
Gospel, St. Paul meant that oral Gospel of his own, 
which, like the twelve Apostles, he had prepared 
and taught. 

The Judaizing party had tampered with St. Paul's 
Galatian converts, and St. Paul writes to some of 
those converts, charging them with having " gone 
over " from his Gospel to " another Gospel." It is 
difficult now to see all the meaning of the concise 



REPROOF OF THE GALATIANS. 329 

words of his heated writing, but their full meaning 
was felt by those to whom he wrote. Those Gala- 
tians had not apostatized, they had neither gone 
back to heathenism nor back to Judaism; therefore 
the only idea that fits well to all that St. Paul 
wrote to them, is, that they had put another Gospel 
(doubtless the written apostolic Gospel of St. Mat- 
thew) in the place of his own oral Gospel. But it is 
hard, with our sense of the harmony of the Gospels, 
to see why this should have called forth such ve- 
hement indignation ; and it is hard so to transfer 
ourselves into that earnest and angry time as to 
make its war about questions, then most vital but 
long since dead, as real as it was. The words of St. 
Paul charge some of the Galatian congregation with 
perverting " another Gospel," which he says is "not 
another" and, from his epistle and from what is 
known of the great conflict among Christians at that 
epoch, these things are certain — They had wrested 
the earliest written apostolic Gospel against the 
cardinal truth that salvation is only through the 
Cross ; if they had not done this doctrinally they 
had done it practically, and it was rightly an open 
and an awful sin in the eyes of Paul. They had 
wrested St. Matthew's written Gospel against St. 
Paul's oral Gospel, which was wickedly to misuse 
the former, for the two Gospels were truly the 
same in spirit and in truth ; and so to abuse St. 
Matthew's Gospel was to bring against St. Paul the 
whole weight of the authority of the Apostles in 
Jerusalem. Having done those things, his enemies 
were sure to say, " Peter we know and Matthew we 



330 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

know, but as for this Paul, we know not who he is," 
and just that they did say. They attacked his Gos- 
pel, and then attacked the Apostle himself; they 
first denied his teachings, and then denied his com- 
mission. These are sure inferences from what St. 
Paul wrote ; for he gave a chapter from his own 
autobiography, telling that after his conversion at 
Damascus he conferred not with flesh and blood; 
went not up to Jerusalem but into Arabia ; and that 
he received his Gospel from the Lord himself. He 
then tells of a journey to Jerusalem, describing it 
by a term not elsewhere found in the Scriptures : 
he went there, he says, loropTjoai lisrpov ; and if we 
may transfer his word bodily from the Greek — thus 
coining a term but little more strange, perchance, 
than St. Paul's to the Galatians, and suggesting 
much the same meaning that his did to them — he 
went there to historize St. Peter. The Greek term 
means to narrate a history or to seek material for a 
history, and here it points either to one or to both 
of these purposes. Either, then, St. Paul went up 
to Jerusalem to draw upon St. Peter's store of 
knowledge of what the Lord said and did, or else 
to compare his own knowledge with the recollec- 
tions of St. Peter.* St. Paul closes his narrative 
with a solemn oath, " Now the things which I write 

* Even had St. Paul merely said (as our version has it) that he 
went up to Jerusalem to see St. Peter, still the whole passage would 
have the sense that has been given to it. Its peculiar word finds 
the excuse for its obscurity in the plainness of the whole statement ; 
and I have not determined the sense of the passage from the mean- 
ing of that one word, but rather the meaning of the word from that 
of the passage. 



THE MEANING OF ST. PAUL. 33 1 

unto you, before God I lie not ; " and, on looking 
at all the facts, at his reasons for bringing out the 
facts, and at the whole tenor of what he says, the 
conclusion is almost irresistible, that he had his 
oral Gospel chiefly in mind. 

St. Paul's charge against his converts is, " You 
have gone over from my Gospel to another ; " and 
it nowhere appears that he had his apostleship in 
mind. He may have had some thought of that, but 
he does not say so, directly or indirectly. His 
word is Gospel. " You have gone over from my 
Gospel /" and it is questionable whether he could 
have said " my Gospel," using the word in the 
broad sense of the truth, for in that sense the Gospel 
is not the Gospel of any man. The Gospel in the 
sense of the truth is known, in its fullness, only to 
Him who is the Truth ; and a Gospel is only so 
much of the truth as he was pleased to make 
known by his servant, the Evangelist. This is 
marked in the title of each of the Gospels, where 
(the article not being found in the best manuscripts) 
we should read, "A Gospel according to St. Mat- 
thew," and so of the others. And when St. Paul 
charges his converts with having " gone over to an- 
other Gospel," he says in the same breath it is not 
"another" — words intelligible enough if the view 
that has been taken of their meaning be correct, 
while it is difficult to give them any other sense 
that accords with the fact that the Galatians had 
not apostatized. 

St. Paul's conflict with the Judaizing party (marks 
of which are deeply graven in the sacred records) 



332 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

was a life and death struggle for the Cross; for they 
held that if a man were not circumcised he could 
not be saved. For and against this dogma, which 
now seems so foolish, ridiculous, and unchristian, 
the war raged with fierceness and bitterness ; but 
the party of the faith so thoroughly triumphed that 
the struggle was almost forgotten until interest in 
it was awakened by that spirit of inquiry into the 
past which is characteristic of our times. In the 
long-forgotten struggle in the earliest Christian gen- 
eration not only was truth more dear to St. Paul 
than his own life, in peril, but he. himself had every 
thing at stake ; for the ritualists denied his apostle- 
ship, and they overthrew the faith of many not only 
in his teaching but in his commission. In the 
midst of the continuing and universal battle, which 
raged not only among the volatile Frenchmen of 
Galatia but every-where, St. Luke put forth the 
Gospel of the decried and defamed Apostle ; (not, 
indeed, without higher motives,) yet for the Apos- 
tle's vindication. Seeing this — St. Luke's addressing 
his Gospel to Theophilus, (a man of good repute, 
no doubt, yet of so little mark that but for St. Luke 
his name would have perished,) which ever before 
had seemed very strange to me, became clear. For 
had St. Luke declared that he was instructed and 
commissioned by the hated Apostle to do what he 
did, it would have gone far to defeat his purpose. 
Addressed to Theophilus, his Gospel was for the 
converts of St. Paul and for the whole congregation. 
Its brief preface simply indicated what St. Luke 
had too much tact to make offensively plain, that 



MOTIVES OF THE EVANGELISTS. 333 

St. Luke had diligently inquired into whatever had 
been delivered by the Twelve Apostles, that he 
had searched into all things from the first, and, 
therefore, all might be certain of the truth of what 
the Apostle to the Gentiles taught ; and this preface 
was followed by what was at once recognized (for 
the most part at least) as the oral teaching of the 
calumniated Apostle. 

The calling forth of the natural powers of the 
holy Evangelists for purposes and through motives 
in part resembling those of other men, has, in these 
times, been more thought of than ever before ; and 
the inquiries made concerning this have, thus far, 
been more or less of a hinderance to faith in the holy 
Scriptures ; but, in the end, larger knowledge of the 
natural in the Scriptures will confirm their inspira- 
tion. The more clearly natural purposes, motives, 
and powers are seen working to produce the Gos- 
pels, the more clearly is seen in them a Supernatu- 
ral purpose and power ; and thus it will, at last, be 
more manifest than ever that each of the Gospels is 
an achievement high above all human effort. Let us, 
then, hopefully pursue our fearless inquiries, for it 
is true alike of the Written and of the Living Word, 
that to know the human in either is to be certain 
that there is in each the indwelling of the Divine. 

In consequence of the malice of the enemies of 
St. Paul in Jerusalem, he was constrained from 
openly doing his work. His two years of duress 
at Caesarea by the Sea were years of seeming in- 
action — but is it possible that St. Paul was ever 
inactive? During those two years St. Luke was 



334 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

his companion ; and the place, (within the bounds 
of the Holy Land,) the freedom of St. Paul from 
any close restraint, the length of the time, and all 
the circumstances, accord with the supposition that 
in the imprisoning of Paul at Caesarea, " the wrath 
of man" was so overruled to the praise of God, that 
it led to the writing out of the Gospel of Paul by 
the hand of Luke. 

St. Paul had that executive capacity and good 
fellowship which promptl}' calls in the help of oth- 
ers ; and in the writing out of his Epistles he at 
times did this. St. Paul was too great a man to envy 
the gifts of other men ; and he could not but have 
known that the genius and culture of his friend and 
companion, St. Luke, were better fitted than his 
own for some kinds of writing. For an orderly ar- 
rangement of ideas St. Paul was not remarkable, 
and the calm flow of narrative was not suited to his 
rapid mind. The torrent rush of his thoughts 
brooked not the restraints that would have been a 
help to their utterance. He is often plain, he is 
always powerful, yet sometimes his sentences are 
twisted into almost inextricable convolutions; and 
the contrast between his rugged, broken, impas- 
sioned, vital eloquence, and the facile and well- 
turned periods of his companion, has been one of 
the strongest reasons why literary critics have doubt- 
ed the Pauline element of the third Gospel. It is, 
however, more reasonable to suppose that St. Luke's 
writing out of the Gospel of Paul grew, in part, out 
of this difference in their style and manner of writ- 
ing, and that, on perceiving St. Luke's superior 



EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. 335 

historic gifts, St. Paul willingly and gladly permit- 
ted a larger liberty in composing and writing than 
he would have given to another. 

At this point, let us glance at an Epistle whose 
history may here have some light thrown upon it, 
and in its turn may throw some light upon that of 
the third Gospel. The Fathers say, that the Epistle 
to the Hebrews was St. Paul's ; and in proof of this, 
it is here sufficient to say, that it was pronounced 
to be such by the Council of Laodicea, (A. D. 363.) 
But though (as with the Second Epistle of St. Peter) 
its origin was known to some of the Churches, and 
to so many more than at once received St. Peter's 
Second Epistle, that it was widely accredited from 
the beginning, yet it was not for a time universally 
acknowledged ; and for this some of the reasons 
are evident. The Epistle to the Hebrews was ad- 
dressed only to a part of the Church, and there- 
fore it was not likely to find its way to the whole 
Church as quickly as the other Epistles. It did 
not bear the superscription of St. Paul ; and its 
style was so unlike that of any of the Epistles 
known to be his, as to raise a doubt as to its Pauline 
authorship. The evidence, then, (as in the some- 
what similar case of the third Gospel,) which, in 
some way, connected St. Paul with the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, must have been strong ; and what we 
have seen of the state of things at the time agrees 
w T ith the idea that there was such a connection. In 
the great conflict in which the honor of Christ, the 
purity of the faith, and Paul's own standing among 
his brethren, were in peril, there was urgent need 



33$ THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

of an appeal to the Hebrew Christians, that should 
meet, on Hebraic ground, those who were swerving 
from the faith ; and there was urgent need of an 
argument from the Old Covenant that should win 
the victory for the New Covenant. If it were to 
accomplish its immediate purpose such an argument 
could not go forth in the name of St. Paul. The 
style of Apollos may have been better suited to 
such an argument ; and that he was in heart and 
soul in unison with the Apostle is a sure inference 
from St. Luke's commendation of Apollos, as " an 
eloquent man, and mighty in the Scriptures." Those 
words exactly describe the writer of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews ; but whether Apollos wrote the Epis- 
tle to the Hebrews, or some one else, the fact that 
the early Christians held it to be one of St. Paul's 
Epistles at least proves that it was written under 
the Apostle's eye. 

Nearly all that was sent forth by the other side 
in that great struggle has utterly perished, with 
the curious and almost worthless exception of the 
Clementine Homilies, a sort of religious romance, 
in which, though written after Paul's lifetime, there 
is an echo of the unscrupulous and bitter hate of the 
Judaizing party toward the Apostle. But the docu- 
ments that were written by St. Paul, and those that 
were written by men acting in concert with him, 
are a complete justification of my denial of the as- 
sertion, that there was no literary instinct at work 
among the Christians in the apostolic generation. 
In a purely literary point of view, nothing was ever 
better concerted, nothing was ever better timed, 



THE SPIRIT OF ST. LUKE. 337 

nothing more exactly fitted to its end, and nothing 
more successful in accomplishing its end, than the 
sending forth of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, 
the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Gospel of St. Luke, 
and " his treatise," known as the Acts of the Apos- 
tles. Christian antiquity ascribed the Epistle and 
the Gospel to Paul, because they came from the 
camp of the great Apostle ; and St. Paul's prisons 
were camps from which his orderlies went forth, and 
the war was carried on. Both of the contending par- 
ties knew that the mind, the will, and the teaching 
of the great Champion were in the Epistle and in 
the Gospel ; and, paying more heed to facts than to 
forms, they said they were St. Paul's ; and they were 
— for the orders given by a General on a battle-field 
are his orders, though written out by subalterns. 

The spirit of St. Luke was pacific and concilia- 
tory. He was unwilling to say any thing that 
would inflame the quarrel, that had arisen to such 
an alarming height, that at Antioch St. Paul " with- 
stood St. Peter to his face"* because, as he boldly 
told the Galatians, "he was to be blamed." When 
St. Luke struck into this great and universal con- 

* See Gal. ii, 11-16. This afterward gave to St. Peter an occa- 
sion to show how grandly he could forget his anger, when just be- 
fore his own decease, in his last Epistle, (as was most needful,) he 
gave his powerful support to St. Paul, by assigning to his Epistles a 
place of equal honor with the writings of the holy Prophets. 2 Pet. 
iii, 15, 16. And (though with this there blends language that almost 
seems to detract from it) yet may it not have been, that in ways hard 
to prove yet easy to conjecture, the still powerful Judaizing faction 
may have partially succeeded for a time in depriving St. Peter's 
Epistle of some of the honor that was its due, because of the honor 
it gave to the Apostle to the Gentiles ? 
22 



338 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

flict he trod boldly on dangerous ground. His ad- 
mirable spirit was that of a man strong and wise as 
well as good ; and I think that his Gospel, (together 
with the Epistle to the Hebrews,) may have done 
hardly less than the Epistles and the labors of St. 
Paul himself, to bring about harmony in the Church. 
St. Luke set the oral teaching of the calumniated 
Apostle in order, so that it might conveniently be 
compared with that of St. Matthew. By transcrib- 
ing the memoir of the holy Virgin he brought her 
fame to the vindication of the Apostle. His earlier 
chapters were felicitously adapted to conciliate the 
Jewish party, for they revealed the fulfillment of 
the ancient promises to Israel, and they clothed the 
religion of the holy Temple with a sacred beauty 
that, losing nothing of its charm, is felt by all who 
read those chapters now. Thus, his Gospel, like 
the preaching of St. Paul, was addressed, " first to 
the Jew and then to the Gentile." Not until he 
had given to his earlier pages this warm and rich 
Jewish coloring did he bring in the Genealogy of 
Jesus, which seems out of place until his reason 
for placing it where he does appears. This gene- 
alogy he carries back not only to Abraham, the 
father of the Jews, but to Adam, the common 
father of the human race, thus opening the full 
breadth of the mission of Christ ; and to do this 
more convincingly he does not bring in this geneal- 
ogy until after the signs at the Baptism. And here, 
in this Gospel, is laid a basis for St. Paul's teaching 
to the Corinthians — "The first man Adam was 
made a living soul ; the last Adam was made a 



THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 339 

quickening spirit; the first man is of the earth 
earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" 
— and something of the contrast there drawn out 
seems here to be indicated, when it is said of Jesus, 
" who was the son of Adam," and also said, " who 
was the Son of God." 

My readers can further pursue this line of thought 
for themselves, yet one correction of our version 
may make St. Luke's carrying out of his immediate 
purpose more clear. The angel did not say to the 
shepherds, " I bring you good tidings of great joy 
that shall be to all people," but to the people, that 
is, to the children of Israel ; yet it consists with the 
breadth that he meant to give to his Gospel when 
of those good tidings the anthem of heaven in- 
stantly opens the world-wide promise. And there 
is a like utterance of both ideas when good old 
Simeon is moved by the Holy Ghost to say, " Thy 
salvation thou hast prepared before the face of all 
people, a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory 
of thy people Israel." 

St. Luke followed his Gospel with the Acts of 
the Apostles ; and here, again, his earlier chapters 
are felicitously adapted to his immediate purpose. 
There is no shaping or coloring of the facts ; his 
narrative of the Pentecost has the completeness and 
simplicity of truth ; nothing can be more natural 
than the conduct of the witnesses of those super- 
natural events ; and yet if the supernatural had there 
been foreordained solely for that very end it could 
not have accorded better with St. Luke's purpose 
to vindicate the course of the Apostle to the Gentiles. 



340 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

The Spirit of God there foreshadowed that evan- 
gelizing of all nations which was the work which the 
Lord Jesus intrusted especially to Paul. And when 
the disciples begin to speak in the tongues of the 
nations as the Spirit gave them utterance, it is the 
chief Apostle, it is St. Peter himself, who interprets 
to the multitude the wonder and sign by the words 
of the prophet, " It shall come to pass in the last 
days, saith God, that I will pour out my Spirit upon 
all fleshy After the miracle at the gate called 
Beautiful, St. Peter reminds the people of the divine 
covenant with Abraham, " In thy seed shall all the 
kindreds of the earth be blessed." In alien Sama- 
ria Philip preaches the things concerning the king- 
dom, and then St. Peter, " sent " by the Apostles, 
preaches " in many villages of the Samaritans." To 
St. Peter comes a vision so enlarging his ideas of 
Christ's kingdom, that at Caesarea by the Sea, he 
opens the way in which the Apostle to the Gentiles 
was to walk, by the baptism of the Roman, Corne- 
lius. And while these great and significant events 
are going on in the glorious company of the Apos- 
tles, Saul is in the company of those Jews who 
plan the trial and the death of St. Stephen ; and 
the martyr's defense of himself before " the coun- 
cil " is a defense of the course of St. Paul, who, in 
the end, takes up the work of St. Stephen just where 
he left it when Saul was consenting to his death. 

The contrast, then, of the spirit and course of 
Saul with that of St. Peter makes the course of Paul 
more striking and glorious when, called to this 
work by the Lord in person at Damascus, and car- 



ST. LUKE AS AN EVANGELIST. 34 1 

rying out what St. Peter began, he goes forth to 
evangelize the nations. St. Luke, then, records 
such labors, triumphs, and sufferings of the Apos- 
tle that the Apostle's death is not needed for his 
vindication. St. Luke could not record that, for he 
did not wait until his friend was dead to fight his 
battle ; he came to his friend's help while he lived, 
and what he told of him was so much to St. Paul's 
honor that could he have placed the crown of mar- 
tyrdom on the brow of the dead Apostle it would 
have added nothing. 

When thinking of the greatness of St. Luke as 
the earliest historian of the Church, I cease to won- 
der that generations passed before any mortal dared 
to follow in his footsteps ! But if we rest even for 
an instant in the idea that St. Luke wrote only as 
the champion of a man, though that man were St. 
Paul, or if we rest even for an instant in the idea 
that he was merely the historian of the Church, we 
undervalue the gift of God in what he wrote. We 
have traced his lower purpose to mediate between 
the hostile parties in the Congregation, that we 
might gain that better understanding of the origin 
and construction of his writings which is needful in 
the doubts and controversies of these times ; but 
the greater is sacrificed to the less if we do not ever 
remember that in what St. Luke wrote concerning 
what was done after the Resurrection as well as be- 
fore, he was the Evangelist of the Lord Jesus. His 
soul was ever bent to tell what the Lord Jesus 
" began both to do and to teach ; " and what an idea 
that word gives of St. Luke's intelligence of the far- 



342 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

reaching purposes of the Lord, for never did sub- 
limer truth visit the soul than that which is uttered 
in that word began ! The full sense of St. Luke's 
glory as Christ's Evangelist has rightly veiled his 
lower and more human purposes — as the sunlight 
veils the stars — for, through the help of God's grace, 
all that was merely human in his motive and pur- 
pose was made so entirely subordinate to his mani- 
festation of the Lord, whether in his life on earth 
or as he rules at God's right hand, that St. Luke's 
Scriptures are an everlasting blessing, while all that 
was temporary in the ends they once served is well- 
nigh forgotten. 

St. Paul said he had " neither received his Gos- 
pel of man nor was taught it, but by revelation of 
Jesus Christ." We have seen reason to think that 
he was then speaking of his oral Gospel, and there 
are some other reasons that may go to uphold this 
conclusion. The Judaizing party wrested St. Mat- 
thew's Gospel against the truth in its integrity, and 
this, with the fact that the chief Apostle found it 
so difficult to hold on to the true idea of the large 
freeness of the New Dispensation, though revealed 
to him in vision, make it quite certain that such a 
Gospel as that of St. Luke could not have been writ- 
ten by any one of the Twelve Apostles. And in 
such a state of feeling as then existed among those 
Apostles, may there not have been, in the case of 
the third Gospel, the nodus dignus vindice, the oc- 
casion calling for an intervention of the Lord Jesus, 
that would correspond to the meaning that has 
been given to St. Paul's words ? 



ST. PAUL'S MEANING. 343 

In St. Paul's fulfilling the work it was given him 
to do his great instrument of power was his oral 
Gospel ; his preaching, like that of the Twelve Wit- 
nesses, was the telling of what the Lord Jesus said 
and did ; and as St. Paul had not been an eye-wit- 
ness of the Lord, as he was to stand so much alone 
in his work and to be hated by many in the Church 
for what he did, may there not have been sufficient 
reason why, in framing his oral Gospel, he should 
have had help from the Lord in person ? May it 
not have been that nothing else would have met the 
case ? And what is the meaning that should be 
given to these words of our Lord to Paul at Damas- 
cus : " I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, 
to make thee a minister and a witness of these 
things which thou hast seen, and of those things in 
the which I will appear unto thee? " 

Whether St. Paul means that he had communi- 
cations from the Lord that put him in as good con- 
dition as the other Apostles to frame his oral Gos- 
pel; or whether, in learning of the life of his Lord, 
he availed himself of means open to all, interrogat- 
ing disciples more favored than himself, comparing 
and weighing their words, supplying from the mem- 
ory of one what was lacking in another, and that his 
oral Gospel thus framed was sanctioned by the Lord 
in person — these are open questions ; but while the 
latter idea may answer to his words, and seems to 
be required by some of the facts in the case, noth- 
ing less than this can answer to his words. 

While thinking of these questions I looked to see 
whether any thing could be found in the third Gos- 



344 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

pel to confirm the meaning that has here been 
given to St. Paul's words. The prayer of the thief 
whispered from dying lips and the Saviour's low re- 
sponse may have been inaudible to others ; though 
the loud reviling of the impenitent felon when nailed 
to the cross may have been heard, and so have come 
to St. Matthew's knowledge. The other Evangel- 
ists seem not to know that on the Mount, Moses 
and Elias talked with Jesus of His decease which He 
should accomplish at Jerusalem ; Peter and they that 
were with him seem then (Luke ix, 31-33) to have 
been " heavy with sleep." I thought also of the 
change in the order of the Temptations in the wilder- 
ness. But though in these things there may possi- 
bly be the evidence I was seeking, this is far from 
certain. The lack of such evidence may be in part 
the reason why St. Paul's words are so generally 
held to refer to the Gospel in its broad sense. But 
natural as may be the impulse to see if in that way 
the origin of the Gospel can be determined, it is a 
mistaken one ; for as the Gospels are all inspired by 
the Spirit of the Lord, it would probably be utterly 
in vain to seek in the third Gospel for any distin- 
guishing signs of his special intervention. And it 
should be remembered by those believers who in- 
cline rather to lessen than to heighten the miracu- 
lous in the Gospels, that the miraculous is not a 
thing of degrees. The intervention of the Lord Jesus 
in the framing the third Gospel would have been no 
more miraculous than his recalling by his Spirit his 
Sermon on the Mount to St. Matthew, or his last dis- 
courses to St. John. 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 345 



CHAPTER VII. 

ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 

fN the presence of nature artists feel that they 
cannot picture its full glory ; that they can only 
suggest the might of the ocean, the grandeur of 
the mountains, the mystery of the skies. Like this 
feeling of artists in the presence of nature was the 
feeling of the Evangelists in the presence of the 
Lord. Had they tried to do what unbelief blames 
them for not doing, they could not have been the 
holy Evangelists, nor could Jesus have been the 
Son of God ! 

The first Evangelist opens the way for the sec- 
ond, the two for the third, and the three, hand 
joined in hand, make ready for the last Gospel. 
Here the plow might be driven in deep, abundant 
harvests gathered. " The world could not contain 
the books that might be written " concerning the 
harmonies through which the four Gospels become 
the one Gospel. Those harmonies disclose them- 
selves to every deeper look, but all that can here 
be done is barely to indicate lines of thought that 
run to every chapter, paragraph, and verse. 

Each Evangelist wrought according to the laws 
of his own nature while portraying so much of the 
glory of Jesus as the Spirit revealed ; yet each one 



346 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

of them brings out something that might rather be 
looked for in the Gospel of some one of the others. 
In St. Matthew's, Jesus is Christ rejected ; yet he is 
Rex tremendce majestatis, the King terrible in maj- 
esty, who sends " not peace ©n earth, but a sword." 
There he is the " smitten and afflicted " One whom 
the prophets foreknew ; there it is written, " The 
foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have 
nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
head ;" and there it is also written, " When the Son 
of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy 
angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of 
his glory, and before him shall be gathered all 
nations." 

Recalling the difficulty of even St. Peter's having 
written such a Gospel as St. Luke's, let us give a 
parting glance at the motives through which the 
Divine Wisdom ordained that a Gospel such as 
that of St. Mark should emanate from one of the 
Twelve, when as yet their souls were not wholly 
freed from the trammels of Judaism. The second 
Gospel sets forth the authority of Jesus in teaching, 
his power in action ; it reproduces the impression 
which the Lord's Divinity made on St. Peter's own 
soul and on the souls of others ; it tells not of the 
quaking earth, the rending graves, but of how the 
Roman, whose soldiers nailed Jesus to the cross, 
cried out when Jesus died, " Truly this man was 
the Son of God." Through its affinity with the 
first Gospel, and through its originating ' motive, 
humble and human as it was, it becomes a pre- 
sentment of Christ as prefigured in Melchizedek, 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 347 

who " was without father, without mother, without 
descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end 
of life, but made like unto the Son of God." * Thus 
this Gospel prolongs, and, if it were possible, makes 
the majesty of the Saviour more sublime ; and yet 
in this Gospel alone is it said that the kindred of 
Jesus thought " he was beside himself." 

We should further mark how the truth unfolds 
in the Gospels in that order in which they are to 
stand forever. At their beginning, through the 
title Emmanuel, St. Matthew reveals who Jesus 
was, which is the more significant, since nowhere 
else in the New Testament is that title given to 
the Saviour. To prove that there was in Jesus 
the nature thus revealed St. Matthew bends all the 
might of his mind, and then St. Peter is sent to his 
aid. All the Gospels reveal the Son of God ; but 
after those of St. Matthew and St. Peter comes 
that of St. Paul, which, still opening His glory and 
His grace, is more fully the Gospel of the man Christ 
Jesus. In the first Gospel nothing is told of the 
human circumstances of the Birth of Jesus ; in the 
second nothing is said of his birth at all, it begins 
with Christ Jesus, the Son of God. Then, the 
course of the revelation would be instructive to 
those who would fain believe there is a legendary 
element in the Gospels, were their hearts open to 
reason ; for though the third Gospel confirms those 
before it as to the nature of Jesus, it goes on to tell 
of the new-born Babe tended by his mother in the 
manger of an inn. The Babe carried to the Sanc- 

* See Gen. xiv, 18, 19, 20 ; Heb. vii, 1-3. 



348 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

tuary is redeemed like other babes ; his Mother is 
purified like other women ; the Child grows in wis- 
dom and stature ; at twelve years of age the Boy 
comes, as other boys do, to the Temple with his 
father and mother ; and the Man preaches his first 
sermon in Nazareth, " where he had been brought 
up." 

Thus the unfolding of the Gospel conforms to the 
fact, which is not that Jesus was a man raised to 
the skies, but that he came down from heaven.* 
After revealing the Son of God it gives to his birth 
all its human environments, even to the placing of 
the crib of the new-born Babe among the cribs of 
the patient cattle, " who wait for the manifestation 
of the sons of God." It descends into all the hu- 
miliation of the helplessness of infancy without the 
least jarring upon our intellectual, moral, or aesthetic 
sense — a literary miracle that should convince men 
of letters of the truth of what is so divinely told. 
Yet literary genius, shrinking from the consequences 
of owning Jesus who convicts of sin and condemns 
sin, has too often withheld its witness to this mira- 
cle wrought within its own sphere ; yet what the 
wise would hide from their hearts is the silent 
thought, not the less real, though voiceless, of the 
most unlettered Christian that ever heard the Gos- 
pel of St. Luke. 

The Divine majesty of Jesus is every-where in 
the third Gospel ; yet, in comparison with the first 
and second Gospels, and in one view of it, (not ex- 
clusive or exhaustive, yet a true one,) St. Luke's is 

* Here see his own words to the ruler of the Jews. John iii, 13. 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 349 

the Gospel of the Son of man. As such it harmo- 
nizes the earlier Gospels with the last, leading on to 
the Gospel of St. John, in which the glory of the Son 
of God shines through the glory of the Son of man. 
Knowing that he would " tarry " long, St. John 
gave to his share of the work that was assigned by 
the Apostles to St. Matthew and himself* the pa- 
tient thought of a long life-time. Meanwhile, St. 
Matthew had finished his share of the work as early 
as the seventh year after the crucifixion, and his 
Gospel, with those of St. Mark and St. Luke, had 
become known to the whole congregation. In the 
changes of those years the strange speculations of 
the Gnostics so began to appear, that the prelude 
to St. John's Gospel may, in part, have been meant 
to guard against errors that were more fully to be 
developed ; and some have thought that St. John 
kept those errors in mind throughout his Gospel. 
But, on considering the earlier Gospels, the method 
of St. John, and that his was the final Gospel, it 
would seem that had there been no such theosophic, 
Oriental heresies, its first fourteen verses might have 
been as they are. 

* On page 114 a tradition given by Eusebius was reconciled with 
what had been said of the origin of St. John's Gospel. The Mura- 
torian tradition is that in a vision it was revealed to Andrew, the 
Apostle, that John was to write a Gospel. This might confirm what 
had been said of the apostolic selection of John as an Evangelist, 
but I thought it best to ground that fact solely on the reasons given, 
and refer to the tradition solely for the sake of completeness. Yet, 
with some other facts, it makes it probable that when St. John wrote 
he had not outlived all his brethren, which, inadvertently, is almost 
implied in the words supposed, on page 112, to have been uttered by 
the last of the Apostles save St. John. 



350 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

The error that the tone of the last Gospel, as to 
the glory of Christ, is at variance with that of the 
others, finds its evidence, if any where, in those four- 
teen verses, and it is disproved by one of the pur- 
poses for which they were written. For through 
those verses St. John brought his Gospel into har- 
mony with what St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. 
Luke had before made known of the glory of Jesus 
at his birth, at his baptism, and on the three mount- 
ains. Of all men St. John was the one best fitted 
to clothe in words the truth contained in those four- 
teen verses ; but, evidently, it is truth that is con- 
firmed as well as affirmed — it is truth which was 
familiar to all Christians.* And that it was thus 
familiar would be seen by all (save those who mis- 
take or willfully disparage the intelligence of the 
early Christian congregations) had the books of the 
New Testament been placed in their time-order ; 
for then St. Paul's Epistles to the Philippians and 
Ephesians, with the Epistle to the Hebrews, would 
have come in before the last Gospel. 

No general statement can sum up the work of the 
aged apostle, no one formula can express all he had 

* The statement of Eusebius, that when St. John wrote, the other 
Gospels were every-where known, is discredited in recent comments, 
because it is imagined- that St. John could not have known of the 
other written Gospels. Yet, on looking at the dates given in those 
orthodox volumes to the four Gospels, and on reflecting upon the 
civilization of the Roman world in St. John's time, one cannot but 
think that if St. John, with his commanding position and intellect, 
had not heard of and read the other Gospels, the great Apostle, 
while not a very old man, must have become stone-deaf and stone- 
blind. Truly the Christian religion is divine ; it triumphs over the 
assaults of enemies, and it outlives the folly of its friends ! 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 35 I 

in his mind and heart to do; yet his thesis, with as 
much completeness and precision as it well can be 
set forth in a single line, is this : The Eternal Word 
manifest in the flesh. But it should be further said 
that, by his first fourteen verses, St. John was made 
free to lay more stress than he otherwise might 
have done on that part of his thesis indicated by the 
words manifest in the flesh ; also, that he does not 
try to heighten the idea of the divine nature of Je- 
sus through higher revelations than those in the 
earlier Gospels, (which it was not possible to do,) 
and that his method of disclosing the divine nature 
of Jesus is rather by broadening and heightening 
the impression made by his human nature. Thus 
the course of the Gospels is that of the natural de- 
velopment of faith in Jesus; for first the soul is 
struck with the miracle of his divinity, and then with 
the miracle of his humanity, and at last it finds in 
the latter an ever-increasing evidence of the former. 
The courage of the earlier Evangelists, when they 
have no fear that the cruel mockings and scourgings 
of Jesus will take away from the sense of his Divin- 
ity, is morally sublime. St. John shares in that 
feeling, and in him it passes into an ever-present 
conviction that to know the Son of man is to be- 
lieve in the Son of God. In a way almost his own 
— though there are instances of it in the other Gos- 
pels — St. John brings out the Saviour's divinity 
through sudden and vivid contrastings of his divine 
and his human nature. "When Jesus saw Mary 
weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came 
with her, he groaned in spirit and was troubled. 



352 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

Jesus wept; and again groaning in himself, cometh 
to the grave." Out of his own heart St. John 
writes ; like St. Matthew, he tells of what he feels. 
Writing such as theirs comes in no other way. St. 
John knows that souls open to the truth will feel 
as he feels; and though the mystery of the humanity 
of Jesus when he weeps and groans at the grave of 
Lazarus becomes almost oppressive, yet even then 
(though we hardly know why) we as truly feel his 
divinity as when, almost in the same breath, " He 
cries with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth." 

Knowing the difference between his method and 
that of the other Evangelists, in his First Epistle 
St. John marks, by his use of the plural, that his 
witness to the Lord is that of all the Apostles ; and 
there he thus states the purpose and method of his 
Gospel : " That which was from the beginning, 
which we have heard, which we have seen with our 
eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands 
have handled of the word of life", (for the life was 
manifest, and we have seen it and bear witness and 
show unto you that Eternal Life which was with the 
Father and was manifest unto us,) that which we 
have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye 
also may have fellowship with us." 

In Jerusalem, almost from the very first, Jesus 
was on his trial and was condemned by the Jews. 
On the first coming of the Saviour to the city (John 
ii, 24) he would not commit himself to the Jews be- 
cause he knew them. Chapter vii, 1, gives as the 
reason why he " would not walk in Jewry," that the 
Jews "sought to kill him." Before that (v, 16, 18) 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 353 

it is said, the Jews sought to slay him;* and the 
end, which came at last, was put off only by his 
prudence and the intervention of God. As a con- 
sequence of this state of things, what he said in 
Jerusalem was of a more personal character than the 
comparatively impersonal Sermon on the Mount. 
In Jerusalem, in his last hours with his disciples, 
his words have the openness of heart of the words 
of one who knows that he is about to die. Some 
of those words are as clear revelations of his divinity 
as any he ever made — " Hast thou not known me, 
Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father;" 
yet some of them most strikingly prove him truly 
man, as when he said, " I have kept my Father's 
commandments." And his Church has ever felt 
that Christ is never more visibly divine, and never 
more human, than in his last hours with his family. 
Much, then, of all that was given to St. John was 
especially suited to his method. But, in meditating 
upon his Gospel, and also upon the others, it is to 
be remembered that each Evangelist was guided 
and watched over by the Divine Spirit, who inspired 
his purpose and wrought toward his Gospel, even to 
the fitting beforehand of events and words to that 
end.f 

* See also John viii, I, 37, 40 ; x, 31 ; xi, 8, 16. Chap, viii says, 
" They took up stones to cast at him : but Jesus hid himself, and went 
out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed 
by." The Greek word rendered "hid himself" means "was hid- 
den ; " it points to a miraculous shielding of Jesus. The greater 
number of manuscripts omit the last clause of the verse. 

\ Of this truth I have before spoken, and would offer these two 
scriptures as indirect yet pertinent evidence of it : John ix, 2, 3, " His 
disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his par- 
23 



354 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

To St. John it was given to complete the Gospel ; 
and therefore his presentment of the Lord must 
needs be in many ways, a broadening and heighten- 
ing of what was before made known of Him. The 
earliest Gospel recalls what Isaiah foreknew of the 
kindling of the Great Light ; and in the third Gos- 
pel there is Simeon's prophecy that the holy Child 
would be a light unto the nations ; but St. John, 
long meditating upon the whole of ancient Scripture, 
even from the day when in the natural world the 
element Light prefigured Christ in the spiritual world, 
concentrates into a focus all its rays, and declares 
Jesus to be the true Light, who enlighteneth every 
man. He never loses sight of this, and he proves 
it by the Scriptures* and by the miracles and by 
the words of Jesus, with a fullness and power that 
becomes the final Gospel. In like manner St. John 
sets forth the truth that Jesus is the Life of the 
soul. Thus, also, in his Gospel and in his Epistles, 
he reveals that in Jesus the love of God is offered 
unto us. And in meditating upon these things, we 



ents, that he was born blind ? Jesus answered, Neither hath this 
man sinned, nor his parents : but that the works of God should be 
manifest in him." John xi, 4, " When Jesus heard that [Lazarus was 
sick,] he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of 
God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." There is more 
direct evidence of it in the many verses where certain things are said 
to have been done " that the Scriptures might be fulfilled." 

* There are more direct references to the Hebrew Scriptures in 
St. Matthew's Gospel than in all the others put together ; yet the 
judicious Archbishop Trench says of St. John, " His Gospel, appar- 
ently less, is indeed far more thoroughly steeped in the Old Testa- 
ment, connected with it by finer and subtler links, than any of the 
other three." 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 355 

should remember that this is the Gospel of the Dis- 
ciple who was nearer than any of his brethren to 
the blessed Mother, as well as to her crucified Son. 
Thus, in every way, the last of the Holy Evangel- 
ists was fitted so to present Jesus in his human 
nature, as through his human nature to bring the 
children of men into communion with him as the 
divine Redeemer, the only begotten Son of God. 

St. John tells us that his Gospel was written that 
we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son 
of God, that believing we might have life through 
his name. In the earlier part of this volume, the 
fact that all the Gospels are arguments to prove 
this, was dwelt upon ; for without its light, their 
structure is dark ; and when the Gospels are mis- 
taken for biographies or histories there are seeming 
faults in their construction which can readily be 
perverted into evidence of a fragmentary and le- 
gendary origin. But though the fact that the Gos- 
pels are such arguments be indispensable to the 
clearing up of their structure, yet devout souls, in- 
stinct with a wisdom of the heart better than that 
of the intellect, may feel that with the enlighten- 
ment it brings there comes a sense of pain and loss ; 
and the effect of that truth is a questionable one 
unless we discern by whom the argument is really 
made. The argument in the Gospels is not made 
by the Evangelists, but by the Lord himself. There 
Jesus proves himself the Son of God, the Saviour 
from sin and every human ill, even from death and 
the grave. Between this idea of the Gospels and 
every other the difference is immense. Every other 



356 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

idea of his Gospels is meaningless and worthless in 
comparison. From its root it is unlike all partial 
and human ideas of the Gospels. It reaches to their 
source and discloses the true power of those won- 
ders of the Eternal Spirit with which time has 
nothing to do. For Christ Jesus comes to us all in 
his Gospels as truly as he came to those Jews who 
received or rejected him. His Gospels bring us all 
into the presence of our Judge. They compel us 
to look on the face of the Saviour, whom if we do 
not accept, we deny. They make to us as real and 
personal an appeal as that which Pilate made to the 
Jews, when he said, Ecce Homo, Behold the man ! 
And with this coming unto us of Jesus in his Gos- 
pels, his rejection by the Jews is so inwrought for 
our warning, that the same wickedness there was in 
them we see in ourselves, if we, through our unbe- 
lief, crucify the Son of God afresh. 

Such in St. Matthew's Gospel is the rejection of 
the Saviour by the Jews, that while it is a pervad- 
ing element in the second and third Gospels — the 
contrast with that darkness making the light more 
vivid — it is less marked in them, because they were 
never to be separate from St. Matthew's. In St. 
Mark's Gospel the Saviour comes to all as the man 
Christ Jesus, by word and deed revealing himself 
the Son of God. In St. Luke's Gospel he comes as 
the universal Friend and Lord, the King of the 
promised age of peace and good-will to man. In 
St. John's Gospel, as said before, he comes to Chris- 
tians ; and I would now complete this truth by say- 
ing, that in the last Gospel He comes to all with a 



ST. JOHN AND THE OTHER EVANGELISTS. 357 

directness of appeal that puts the spirit that is with- 
in us to the most severe of all tests. There He who 
is the Light of the world shines most searchingly 
into the darkness of our hearts ; there his witness 
to himself is the most open and full ; there the pur- 
pose of the Jews to slay him is instant, repeated, 
relentless ; and great as was their sin, so great is 
the sin of all those who reject the Lord Jesus when 
he pleads with them in the last Gospel. And trust- 
ing to my readers to give all needed qualification to 
general words, it may, further, be said, that those 
who reject Jesus as he comes to them in the earlier 
Gospels, reject the Son of God ; and those who re- 
ject him as he comes to them in the Gospel of St. 
John, reject the Son of man. 

St. John completes the Evangeliad ; and then, as 
we contemplate its structure, we see in it the hand 
of Him who planned the worlds in time, for in it the 
course of the Spirit of God is seen to be the same 
with his course in histoiy. He first established the 
truth of the Divinity of Jesus so that it can never 
more be questioned in his Church, and he then began 
the full revealing of his Humanity. The Church is 
now divinely moved as never before to contemplate 
the relations of the Humanity of her Lord with all 
that is below the sun ; and those are yet to be dis- 
closed with a fullness beyond all imagining. Their 
sources are in his Divine Nature, for Jesus can be 
in sympathy with all that rightly springs out of the 
Human Nature, whether in the family, the nation, 
or the race ; he can be in full sympathy with every 
rightful human hope and calling and art, redeem- 



358 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

ing, informing, purifying and glorifying all, because 
he is the Eternal Word, who is the Life in nature, 
the Light in the soul. 

There has ever been some perception of the affin- 
ity of the Divine with the Human Nature. In the 
heathen mythologies gods come down to the earth 
in the likeness of men, and mortals are raised to 
the skies as gods. Such facts go to prove that the 
Incarnation of the Eternal Word is a truth which the 
soul is not unfitted to receive, while at the same time 
they prove that the idea of a perfect union of the 
two natures in one Being is not one the human 
mind, unaided, can seize hold upon. Apart from 
the man Christ Jesus — Son of God and Son of man, 
the fullness of the Divinity given in the one term 
being equal to the fullness of the Humanity given 
in the other — the idea of such a Being was not a 
possible one. It was not possible for man to have 
conceived of the union of the Two Natures in 
Christ, and it was equally impossible for the Apos- 
tles to have conceived of a Life answering to such a 
conception, had not the Eternal Life who is with 
the Father been manifest in the flesh. They had 
seen him and known him, and herein is the sufficient 
answer to all doubt and unbelief concerning the 
Holy Gospels — by the grace of God they so bear 
witness to Christ Jesus that the Written Word is 
the brightness of the glory of the Living Word and 
the express image of his person. 



UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 359 



CHAPTER VIII. 

UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 
N the course of these inquiries nothing has been 



1 



said of St. Matthew's bold departure from the 
order of time. This could only be explained 
in a volume given to that Gospel. With that ex- 
ception, the question, How St. Matthew's Gospel 
came to be in manner and form as it is ? has been 
answered in what has been said of the purpose of a 
Gospel and of its consequent limitations ; of the 
relations of his Gospel to the oral Gospel ; of the 
concert of action between St. Matthew and St. 
John ; and in the chapters that give the reasons 
for his silence or reserve as to some facts of great 
moment, and that also fixed the time when St. 
Matthew wrote. Some things that were said of the 
construction of the earliest Gospel bore upon that 
of the other Gospels, and the simpler motive and 
less complicate structure of the second Gospel per- 
mitted a somewhat complete answer to be given to 
the question, How did that Gospel come to be in 
manner and form as it is ? We have also inquired 
into the origin of the third Gospel, and into the 
relations of the final Gospel with St. Matthew's and 
w T ith those of the other two Evangelists. 

The relations traced out have, in the main, been 
those of a general kind ; but besides these, there 



360 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

are special affinities and correspondencies between 
the Gospels, and between parts of the same Gospel, 
whose thorough searching out gives a sense of the 
oneness of the Evangeliad that can be given in no 
other way. Thus St. John gives no description of 
the Ascension, (twice described by St. Luke,) yet 
in his Gospel (vii, 63) it is foretold by the Lord 
himself; and again, (xx, 17,) in what He said to 
Mary Magdalene. The Eucharist is not described 
by St. John, yet the truths that were uttered when 
it was instituted were revealed before in the Dis- 
course in the Synagogue at Capernaum, (vi, 32-58,) 
given only by St. John. As casual illustrations of 
such harmonies compare what St. Matthew says of 
the Baptist's reception of the Pharisees with our 
Lord's words in the third Gospel, (vii, 29, 30; xi, 
44.) Also compare Acts iv, 13 with John vii, 15 ; 
also John vii, 53 and viii, 1 with Matt, viii, 20 and 
Luke xxi, 37 ; also John vii, 47 with Matt, xxvii, 
63 ; also Mark viii, 12 with John xi, 33, 38. An 
exhaustive study of such harmonies of Scripture 
seems to be impossible. To trace them with the 
help of a reference Bible and Concordance (and 
especially the prophetic intimations of the New in 
the Old Dispensation) is a constant pleasure and 
surprise. Every one may find new ones, for these 
cross lights are as numberless as those of the stars, 
and the marvel of these lights in the firmament of 
Scripture is as great as the marvel of the lights in 
the firmament of heaven — and the heavens will pass 
away, (2 Pet. iii, n,) but the truths which the Lord 
reveals in his holy Scriptures abide forever ! 



UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 36 1 

It has been our intent to give only a general 
view of the unity of the Evangeliad, and we con- 
clude with a word more concerning the most re- 
markable of the differences between the three ear- 
lier Evangelists and St. John, who completed the 
writing out of the Gospel. Much thought has been 
given to minor differences, and comparatively little 
to the fact that Matthew, Mark, and Luke record 
the institution of the Eucharist, and pass over our 
Saviour's last words to his disciples on the same 
night, and St. John, who is silent as to the former, 
records the latter. These facts, together with St* 
John's silence concerning the prophecy on Mount 
Olivet, point to an understanding between him and 
St. Matthew as to the structure of their Gospels. 
His passing over the prophecy is little or no evi- 
dence of this, for he may have thought that the 
three previous records of it, like the three of the 
Transfiguration, were complete. 

That prophecy largely pertained to the end of a 
cycle of time which the last Evangelist looked upon 
as closed so far as the Jews were concerned. Its 
proper place, then, was in the earlier Gospels, for, 
more than the others, the Gospel of St. John looks 
forward to the future. This is seen in the coming 
of the Greeks seeking the Saviour ; and more fully 
in our Lord's promise of the Holy Ghost, who, in 
his stead and with greater power than his own, is 
to convince the world of sin and of righteousness 
and of judgment to come. 

It was every way different with the discourses on 
the night before the crucifixion. St. Matthew and 



362 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

St. Peter heard them ; yet they are not given in the 
first nor in the second Gospel, neither are they given 
in the third. From all of these facts the inference 
is sure, not only that St. Matthew and St. John 
wrote in concert, but that both St. Peter and St. 
Paul knew that the writing out of these words of 
the dying Saviour was intrusted solely to the Disci- 
ple whom Jesus loved. 

It was more than human wisdom that separated 
the word given on Mount Olivet and the institution 
of the holy Sacrament from the last words of Jesus 
to his family. He always speaks like himself, and 
there is no dissonance between the prophecy and 
the farewell ; but there is a wide difference in their 
effect on the mind and the heart, and they were di- 
vinely kept apart because the soul, in the same mood 
of mind and heart, cannot assimilate them. The 
reason why the institution of the sacrament is, in 
like manner, kept apart from the farewell of Jesus, 
is of greater moment. The wisdom of God in plac- 
ing even those solemn and tender words of his Son 
apart from the holy sacrament, so constructed the 
Gospels that the sacrament should stand out by it- 
self in a way that tends to give to that ordinance 
its right place in the mind and heart of his Church. 

Seeming differences of a minor sort, such as there 
must needs be in narratives of the same events 
when the attendant circumstances that once would 
have made them clear have long been forgotten, 
rightly appear to be of little account when so re- 
markable a difference is explained and justified, and 
become a help to making the organic unity of the 



UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 363 

Evangeliad as clear to the Christian intellect as it 
has ever been to the Christian heart. The sense of 
that unity is heightened by the study of the distinc- 
tive characteristics of each Gospel. That unity is 
not matter of private opinion nor of any late find- 
ing out. Differences in the Gospels were as clearly 
seen, as keenly felt, and more exaggerated, in the 
apostolic generations than they have ever been 
since ; yet in all past time, even as now, Christians 
have felt that the fourfold Evangel was one Evan- 
gel ; and of this, feeling is the highest critical test, 
and the only decisive one. 

To that unity let us give one parting glance ; 
and, my friendly and tireless reader, you will make 
what further I have to offer your own better than 
through any labor of argument, if you will imagine 
yourself to be one of the Christians dwelling in 
Alexandria in the last half of the first century, and 
will put yourself in the place and enter into the 
thoughts and feelings of a Christian convert in that 
age, when, at four different times and from four dif- 
ferent places, the four Gospels came to that great 
center of the intelligence of the Roman world. In 
Alexandria, in the first Christian century, you are 
reading the manuscript of St. Matthew's Gospel. 
Knowing the great outlines of the Saviour's life 
from the oral teaching in the churches, and having 
often heard traditions of his ministry in Judea, you 
are surprised to find that up to the time of his last 
visit to Jerusalem St. Matthew so confines his rec- 
ord to what took place in Galilee. Still you are 
not surprised that he does not mark this omission, 



364 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

because the great fact, that he passes over in silence, 
is familiar to all. You wonder more to find that 
after his description of the Sacrament he omits those 
solemn and tender words of love, of hope, of proph- 
ecy, with which the Lord took leave of his Disciples, 
some faint rumor of which has gone every-where 
abroad. His silence seems so strange in a Gospel 
largely framed of discourses of the Lord, that for 
the moment you question the correctness of what 
you had heard ; but, as you reflect upon the scene 
in that large upper chamber, on that hour looked 
forward to by the Lord, on the peaceful private in- 
terview at night, on the institution of the new sac- 
rament, on the fearful separation that was nigh, you 
feel convinced that the Church has not been mis- 
taken in its belief that in that hour the Lord uttered 
words such as even by him were never said at any 
other time. You think of his discourse when the 
Disciples were sent forth on their mission, and your 
conviction deepens that he parted not from them 
in this silence. You think over the Sermon on the 
Mount ; you think over all his recorded discourses ; 
and, with his life, his death, his glorious resurrec- 
tion before your mind, you try to frame for your- 
self the farewell of the Lord to his children on the 
eve of his betrayal, his trial, condemnation, and 
death. Vain the effort of the unsatisfied mind ! 
You even doubt whether those great discourses that 
before filled your soul with such content might not 
have been better spared than this which you so 
much desire to hear. Nor can your earnest heart 
be satisfied even with the manuscript of an Apostle, 



UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 365 

until the thought comes to your mind that St. 
Matthew could only have passed over what was so 
precious because he knew that some one would co- 
operate with him in the great work of making a 
written memorial of the life of the Lord. 

Years pass away, and then the Gospel penned by 
Mark, and accredited by the last Epistle of St. Pe- 
ter, becomes known to the Christian world. The 
first disciple who comes thereafter journeying from 
Babylon bears with him the precious scroll, a wel- 
come offering to the Church in Alexandria. You 
read the manuscript and find that, like St. Mat- 
thew's, it passes over the ministry of the Lord in 
Judea, and that it contains not those words which 
your heart longs more and more to hear as life is 
passing away. 

At length the Christians of Alexandria are glad- 
dened with the Gospel of St. Luke ; you unroll the 
manuscript, and read with kindling eyes the opening 
words, which promise to confirm that which is be- 
lieved in all the Churches, and which seem to prom- 
ise to you that the writer can and will supply what 
the others have omitted. The opening of the Gos- 
pel is glorious beyond your hopes. There is the 
Evangel of the infancy, there are the memories 
which the mother's heart had treasured up of the 
birth of the Holy Child, the gift of the Blessed 
Virgin to the Church. There are many things new 
and precious. But even this Gospel is no less won- 
drous in its silence than glorious in its fullness ; 
for some reason leads St. Luke, as it had led St. 
Mark and St. Matthew, to pass over in silence what 



366 THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS. 

the Lord did in Judea, and like them to pass over 
in silence those words so long waited for in earnest 
hope ; and again it seems to you that the only so- 
lution of this mystery is that to some Apostle has 
been intrusted the high duty of recording the sacred 
life in Judea, and that to him also has been granted 
the honor and blessing of prolonging in the Church 
forever, the celestial music of those parting words 
of the Saviour. 

The years roll on until your hope begins to die. 
You hardly think you will ever hear those words on 
earth, and believe they exist for you only in the 
record of things below the sun, that is treasured in 
heaven. But at length the manuscript of the last 
Apostle flies through the world. Christian Alex- 
andria, crowding on the mole, greets afar on the sea 
the welcome bark that brings one who, in his bo- 
som, bears a scroll more precious than all the costly 
freight which the galley is hurrying to the mart 
with the speed of the wind and the strength of the 
oar. The manuscript of the aged Apostle is un- 
rolled in the Church of Alexandria. You listen to 
that choral song, which flows as if from out the 
infinite far realms, where Christ hath gone. Page 
after page falls on the listening ear of the vast 
throng; all and more than all you know of the 
Lord in Judea is told as only by St. John it could 
be told. The sacred record grows into full beauty 
and perfection. At length the intense feeling of the 
weeping throng deepens to an ecstasy of fear and 
hope, and, amid all the uproar of the crowded mart, 
whose living surges beat against the walls, the 



UNITY OF THE EVANGELIAD. 367 

hushed temple is still as a sepulcher as the reader 
comes to the night of the solemn Sacrament, of 
some of whose words but faintest echoes had 
reached the Christian Church, and lo, at that mo- 
ment when Matthew, Mark, and Luke hushed their 
voices in reverential silence, the reader goes on re- 
citing, " Let not your hearts be troubled : ye be- 
lieve in God, believe also in me." With adoring 
thankfulness, with wrapt wonder, you hear this un- 
imagined word. The wisdom and mercy of God 
hath at last given to man a record of his Son com- 
plete beyond all fear, glorious beyond all hope. 
You foreknow that every dying Christian will hear 
the words, " Let not your heart be troubled : ye 
believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's 
house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place 
for you." The work of the chosen Witnesses is at 
last complete, and, like him who beheld the glory 
of the Life of the Lord in its beginning, seeing the 
full glory of its close, you say, " Lord, now lettest 
thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes 
have seen thy salvation." 



INDEX: 

WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 



Those who consult the Index in this (as well as in my other 
books) will find in short-hand, facts set forth there, rather than to 
overburden the Text with notes ; or that, with the printed page 
before me, yet seemed to be needed. Thus, for the Taxing under 
Cyrenius, see the Title, Dates in the Gospels ; for the Time of the 
Last Supper, Times and Seasons. See, also, Mary, the sister of 
Lazarus ; St. Matthew, his Gospel ; Nain, and other Titles. 

Aramean or Syro-Chaldaic Language. Called the Hebrew 
tongue, Acts xxi, 40, xxii, 2 ; in use after the Captivity ; one of 
the two languages spoken by Jews of Palestine at the Christian 
era ; the mother tongue (Mark v, 41, xv, 34, Acts xxvi, 14) of 
our Lord and his Disciples, 96, 97. The transference of the Gos- 
pel from that tongue into Greek, 98 ; could have been so well 
done only by Jews of Palestine, 99 ; this not disproved by the 
style of St. Luke, 99. In that language St. Matthew first wrote ; 
a trace of this, (xvi, 17,) see note, 278. Some years after he 
translated his Gospel into Greek, 99, 193-195. 

Baptism op Christ Jesus. Touches of difference in its descrip- 
tions, 243 ; alluded to, though not described, by St. John, 241, 
242 ; its privacy, 245 : John its sole witness, 245-247 ; was it the 
full Beginning of the Ministry? 241, 245, 255, 261. 

Bethany. Why St. Luke, x, 38, referred to it as "a certain vil- 
lage," 182, 183. St. John's allusion to that verse, 188. That in 
the search of Jerusalem (169) Bethany was included, is not only 
probable in itself, but quite certain from the fact that, for some 
religious purposes, the Rabbins held that suburb to be a part of 
the Holy City. 

Birth of our Lord. The silence of the inspired Evangelists con- 
cerning the Day, 150-152. 

Cana of Galilee. Silence of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as to 

the miracles (John xi, I— II, iv, 46-54) there wrought, 219-222. 

Two sites are claimed for this hamlet, one at Kefr Kenna, four 

miles or so from Nazareth, the other at Kana el Ielil, eight miles. 

24 



370 INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 

Lieut. Conder ("Tent-work in Palestine") thinks "it far more 
probable that Kenna, on the road to Tiberias, would be the place 
twice visited by Christ, than the remote Kana, which is on no 
man's road of travel." The sites were so near that this is of no 
weight ; and that Kana was on no man's road of travel rather 
strengthens the tradition (much the most ancient of the two) that 
it was the place. Its name is strong evidence of it, and since the 
time of Robinson it has been generally held to be so. It matters 
little or nothing to my argument which of the sites is the true one 
— the village, unnamed by Josephus or in the Talmud, was hum- 
ble and obscure. 

Capernaum. Silence of Matthew, Mark, and Luke concerning the 
healing (John iv, 46-54) of a son of a nobleman of that city, 178, 
219-222. 

Dates in the Gospels. 150-158. The Birth of Christ, 150-152 ; 
beginning of his Ministry, 154-156, 266, 267; Acts x, 34-37. 
"Then Peter said, the word which God sent unto the children 
of Israel, began from Galilee after the baptism which John 
preached" Line fifth, 157, and line fourth, 151, require a word 
concerning a parenthesis that has given rise to a learned, volumi- 
nous, instructive, interesting, and, for the most part, irrelevant 
debate. " In the days of Herod the king (Luke i, 5) it came to 
pass that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all 
the world should be taxed, (ii, 1, 2 ;) and this taxing was first made 
when Cyrenius was Governor of Syria" Even in the rudest 
taxation there are, I. The census or enrollment ; 2. The valuation 
or assessment ; 3. The collection. In all languages the word 
Taxation points to one or another of these stages of the process, 
or to the whole process, as the case may be. If it were now writ- 
ten that a Decree for Taxation went forth from the Emperor Na- 
poleon III., and was carried out by President M'Mahon, change 
of government and delay would be implied. St. Luke marks that 
when the Decree went forth the grandest of monarchs, next to 
Csesar, reigned in Jerusalem. His intense personality and dra- 
matic history, his largesses to cities of Europe and Asia, the 
feeling that he was the last of the great subject-kings of Rome, 
and the length of his reign, made him, after Augustus, the most 
striking figure and best-known man in the Roman world. The 
crash of the great Herodian house — sonitum ruince auditum 
Medis — resounded through the Roman world as through our world 
the late crash of the Corsican Dynasty. Jerusalem was " far 
the most illustrious city of Asia," (Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. v, 15 ;) 



INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 371 

then as now the Jews were every-where ; and then as now it 
was felt by nu^riy that somehow the world's fate was bound up 
with theirs. St. Luke, with the brief allusion, proper in a paren- 
thesis, to things well known, points onward to the epoch eleven 
years after Herod's death, when Augustus made Jerusalem a sub- 
urb of Antioch, Judea a province of Syria, and sent into exile 
the son of his ally and friend. If, with the three stages of Tax- 
ation in mind, the parenthesis be read in the light of the 
time, the long-drawn debate about it is seen to be out of all 
proportion to the case, for its meaning becomes too plain for con- 
troversy. 

Family of Bethany. Mary and Martha, unnamed by Matthew 
or Mark, and briefly noticed by Luke (x, 38) as living in " a cer- 
tain village " — strangeness of this reserve as to the Family now of 
all others in Judea the most thought of save that of our Lord ; the 
use made of it to discredit the Gospels ; and its reason, 181, 182. 
St. John's reference (xi, 10, n) to that verse of St. Luke, 188. 
This is evidence of his thorough knowledge of this Gospel. Of 
the intention of the chief priests to kill Lazarus at the time of 
the Crucifixion, 171. Of the suppression of the name of Mary by 
Matthew and Mark when describing what she did in the house 
of Simon of Bethany, 183-188. 

Fathers. "Worth of their evidence to the origin and authorship of 
the Gospels, 70, 313, 314. Their universal testimony to St. 
Peter's relation to the second Gospel, 313-315. Alford's mis- 
take as to its nature and value, 313. Their testimony to St. Paul's 
relation to the third Gospel less general, but decisive, 322-324. 

Galilee. The people of, 122. 

Greek Language. Spoken in Jerusalem and in all Palestine, 97. 

Inspiration of the Gospels. Part I, chap, viii, pp. 134-146. 

John the Baptist. Portraits of, 242 ; see also 254. Consistency 
of his history, 243-245. Brought up in the desert, 244 ; see 
also 159. His greatness, 247. His sole witness to the signs at 
the Baptism, 245, 246. Never preached in Jerusalem, 254. The 
introduction of his witness into the prelude to St. John's Gospel, 
247-253. His last testimony, 267, 268. Of the continuance of 
his proclamation after he knew that Jesus was the Messiah, 
254-261. The causes of his imprisonment and murder. Did 
the Pharisees have any thing to do with it ? 268-270. 

John, St. Why chosen one of the apostolic Evangelists, no, 112, 
124, 126. The long time that he took to meditate upon his Gos- 
pel, 1 15, 116, 349, note. The thoroughness of the oral teaching 



372 INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 

in all the Churches should be noted in this connection, as well as 
that the other Gospels were every-where known. Tradition in 
Eusebius as to the origin of his Gospel, 114, 115 ; in the Murato- 
rian Catalogue, 349, note. His Gospel. Reasons why the min- 
istry in Judea was assigned to John, 112, 123-126. Comment on 
its earlier chapters, Part III, chaps, ii, iii, iv, pp. 240-287. His 
relations with his old master, the Baptist, 242, 248, 249. Intro- 
duction of his witness into the prelude to the Gospel, 247-253. 
Its theme — the eternal Word manifest in the flesh, 350, 351. The 
opening of his Gospel presupposes the revelations of the divinity 
of the Lord in the other Gospels, 350. See also 249, 250, 251. 
They prepare for the last Gospel, 345, 349, 350. St. John's method, 
351, 352. His Gospel the completion of the Evangeliad, 354. 
Looks more to the future than the other Gospels, 361. 

Josephus. Character of his writings, 47-51. 

Judea. Its isolation, 118. Feeling of the Jews in the days of the 
Disciples, that of all Palestine only this district was then the 
Holy Land, 118-121. See also 214, 216. 

Justin Martyr. The exposure by Lightfoot, Westcott, Ezra 
Abbot, and others of the uncritical handling in " Supernatural 
Religion" of the references of Justin to our four Gospels has estab- 
lished, beyond further controversy, conclusions to which judicious 
scholars long since came : so far as required, these are stated, 
104, 105. Justin speaks of St. Mark's Gospel as St. Peter's, 314. 

Lazarus. Not named by Matthew, Mark, or Luke, 182. Strange- 
ness of this and its reason, 181-183. Intent of the Jews to kill 
Lazarus, 171. These verses of John xii, 9, 10, 11, should there 
have been given : To Bethany much people " came not for Jesus' 
sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had 
raised from the dead. But the chief priests consulted that they 
might put Lazarus also to death; because that by reason of him 
many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus." 

Luke, St. Careful as to dates, 151, 157. For his reference to 
Cyrenius, see Dates. His relations with St. Paul, 333-335, 338, 
341. His Gospel. Bearing upon its date of the fact that, like 
St. Mark's, it was of equal authority with the two apostolic 
Gospels, 61, 62. Its relations to the oral Gospel, 102, 92, 93 ; 
also Part III, chap. i. Its place in the unfolding revelation, 296, 
347-349. Difference between its tone and that of the first Gospel, 
293-296, 347. Its description of the centurion compared with 
St. Matthew's, 298-300. Witness of the Fathers that St. Luke 
wrote out the Gospel taught by St. Paul, 322-324. Intent and 



INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 373 

meaning of its preface, 324-333. Why this Gospel was addressed 
to Theophilus, 332. St. Paul's oral Gospel ascribed by that Apos- 
tle to the Lord himself, 342-344. See I Cor. xi, 23 : there St. 
Paul, relating the institution of the sacrament, says, " I received 
of the Lord that which I also delivered unto you." 

Mark, St. The time of his death uncertain, 316 — compare last 
paragraph, 54, 55. His Gospel. That it did not bear the name 
and was not written by one of the Apostles proof of its date, 61, 62. 
Irenseus had this Gospel with its present ending ; and the recep- 
tion of the whole by the congregation in his time is conclusive 
evidence that as completed it had received apostolic sanction. 
The Fathers universally bear witness to the fact that the second 
Gospel is St. Peter's Gospel written out by St. Mark, 313. St. 
Peter's allusion to this Gospel, 315. Its originating and other 
motives, 297-307. Its witness to the Incarnation, 309-311. For 
this Gospel, see 293, 297, 229, 346, 347. 

Mary, the Sister of Lazarus. Her anointing of the Saviour, 
(Matt, xxvi, 6-16; Mark xiv, 3-1 1 ; John, xii, 2-8,) 183-188. 
This was in Bethany, which, in Luke x, 38, is "a village," ku/xtjv 
TLva. He tells of an anointing, (vii, 36-50,) ev ttj tvoXel, "in the 
city ;" that is, Capernaum. Every one has marked the recurrence, 
in his own life or in the lives of others, of similar events. In the 
history of the last hundred years similar events are frequent. 
Twice a great war begins in April, on its 19th day, and with an 
attack upon Massachusetts militia men ; twice a Bonaparte is the 
first officer of a French republic ; twice such a one, by fraud and 
force, becomes emperor ; twice there is sudden ruin ; twice, impris- 
onment and death in exile ; and twice there is an only son. Yet, 
when two thousand years are done, if then there be as now celeb- 
rity-seeking men, they will prove such history is legendary. Of 
the similar events in the life of Christ, not one in fifty is recorded. 
There was little to distinguish the hundred healings of the sick, 
the lame, and the blind. That Christ cleansed the Temple on his 
first coming to Jerusalem, and again at his last coming, was as 
natural as that the traders undid what he had done before. 
Anointing was an Eastern usage. Each of the two anointings was 
in the house of a man of as common a name as that of Smith ; and 
to this striking similarity in the two cases another as remarkable 
might be added — each was in the house of a man, and not of a 
woman ! All else — the place, the persons, all that was said, all that 
was done, was different. And when such spasmodic believers as 
Schleiermacher confound these two anointings there is no escaping 



374 INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 

the conviction that in this case they love darkness rather than 
light. 

Mary, the Mother of our Lord, 106, 365, 171, 172, 190; de- 
cisive evidence of St. Matthew's caution for her safety, 191, 192. 

Matthew, St. Chosen to write out the Gospel, 107 ; his large 
comprehension of what was required of the earliest Evangelist, 
289; reticence and other characteristics, in, 124; his portrait of 
the centurion, 298-300 ; the wounding of Malchus, 229, 230 ; the 
paying of the Temple tax, 232-234 ; his style as affected by 
his reticence, in, 112, 233, 234, end of note; his characteristic 
words, reason for them, 300, 301. His Gospel. Transferred 
from Hebrew into Greek by the Apostle himself, 193-195 : the his- 
toric element larger, and in it the Messianic prophecies more fully 
verified, than in the second or the other Gospels, 289, yet see note, 
354; compared with St. Luke's, 293-296; with St. John's, 288, 
289, 271, 284, 294, 295 ; unity of his Gospel, 288, 235. The style 
of St. Matthew's Gospel that of an eye-witness and its testimony 
personal testimony of the highest kind, 298-301. Yet, echoing 
many others, Godet says "the intuitive descriptive character is 
altogether wanting" to his Gospel. He cites as evidence that 
portrait of the centurion, so life-like that St. Petei passed the 
centurion without a word ! Godet talks of the second editor of 
St. Matthew's Gospel. He caught up this notion from skeptics 
who bring that Gospel down as late as A. D. 130. His own dates 
refute him : these are A. D. 60-63 for our Gospel, and 64 or 65 
for the " Book of Discourses " imagined for St. Matthew. Where, 
then, the time to have set the discourses in a frame of events ? 
Who could have done a work so wonderful and have been utterly 
unknown ? Would St. Matthew have put up with such interfer- 
ence? Would the Church have let another masquerade in the 
Apostle's clothes ? This after-feat of interweaving the words with 
facts so as to make our Gospel is a sheer impossibility. This car- 
rying back and misapplying a later method, this fancying that any" 
Disciple ever thought of editing his Master's words apart from his 
acts, is ridiculous. That a Gospel of such oneness in conception 
and execution can be a patched up thing, made over and mended, 
whether by "a second editor" or by many, (see note, 313,) is as 
silly a critical notion as I ever met with! Godet's facile mind also 
sets aside the decision of the Church as to St. Peter's Second 
Epistle; and faith must dispense with the help of such unquiet 
people, who, in trying to defend it, throw away that for which 
there can be no compensation. 



INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 375 

MURATORIAN CATALOGUE, 323. 

Nain, the Raising of the Widow's Son, 86; why passed over 
by Matthew and Mark, 228. A paragraph for 335, line 29, car- 
rying out the argument in chap, i, Part III, by some oversight of 
mine, was not sent to the printers, and is here given in brief. 
Though the Apostles in their oral Gospel, and the other Evangel- 
ists, showed their confidence in the evidence set forth of their 
Lord's divinity by giving but one manifestation of his power over 
the grave, St. Luke may have thought that if only the one mani- 
festation of that power in the two previously written Gospels were 
given by him, its visible exercise might be left too dependent upon 
a single illustration of it — and yet, from the point of view whence 
we looked at the fifteen miracles, (chap, i, Part III,) the recital of 
the miracle at Nain is seen to be related to the message the Baptist 
sent from his prison at Machasrus, on the other side of the Jordan. 
That message, with the reply and with what was said to the peo- 
ple in consequence of the message, are a long consecutive recital. 
I do not think the miracle was recorded solely or chiefly because 
of this, yet these verses show the natural and close relation between 
the two. " He that was dead sat up and began to speak — and 
this rumor went throughout all Judea and throughout all the re- 
gion roundabout, and the disciples of John showed him all of these 
things, and John calling two of his disciples sent them to Jesus." 
Luke vii, 15-18. 

Names in the Evangeliad, 176-178, 230, 231. In the course of 
the argument, chap, ii, Part III, it should have been said that the 
brethren of our Lord " did not believe in him," (John vii, 5,) and 
that this may have had something to do with St. Matthew's nam- 
ing " James, Joses, Simon, and Judas." xiii, 55. 

Nazareth. A reason suggested for its evil name, 217. 

Papias, A. D. 140, wrote a comment on our Gospels, and interwove 
traditions with it. Of this lost book Eusebius gives a few debated 
sentences. Papias speaks of the Xoyia, (sacred oracles, of Mat- 
thew;) skeptics and others have mistaken this for loyoi, discourses. 
In Rom. iii, 2, and Heb. v, 12, the term is used for the Hebrew 
Scriptures, and it merely shows that Papias held the Scripture of 
Matthew to be inspired. Our Gospels are like no other writings, 
and such the peculiarity of their structure and origin, and so dif- 
ferent the classes to whom they had to be described, that they 
could hardly have had at once a common and exclusive name for 
them. Hence their several names in Justin. The conjecture that 
Matthew compiled a " Book of Discourses " grew out of that 



376 INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 

blunder as to Papias' tejrm, (loyia.) His comment was in five 
parts ; the discourses on the earliest Gospel can be arranged in 
five classes, and in this, confirmation of the conjecture was found ; 
but had Papias* comment been in six or seven parts, (as the 
" Discourses " can be put in as many classes,) the argument from 
this striking coincidence would be as good as now — that is, good 
for nothing. • Papias also says that Matthew wrote in Hebrew; 
and the same persons understand him to say further that every one 
translates him as he best can ; and their inference is, that in his 
time there was no Gospel of Matthew in, Greek. What Papias 
did say was, that there had been a time when each one had to 
translate what Matthew wrote in Aramean as he could — a needless 
and shallow remark touching what was written in the provincial 
tongue of a district not larger than Wales, that suits well with 
Eusebius' poor opinion of the worthy antiquarian's capacity. No 
one cared to preserve Papias' stories merely for their own sake, 
much as he thought of them ; but Eusebius alludes to one about 
" a woman accused of many sins," and, with a positiveness equal 
to the vagueness of this statement, she is now taken to be the 
woman accused of one. John viii, i-ii. St. Augustine gives the 
reason why some ancient versions and manuscripts of the last 
Gospel left that paragraph out. It is becoming the fashion to 
treat that paragraph as not belonging to John's Gospel ; but here- 
tofore critical opinion has been very evenly balanced on that 
point. And now Wordsworth, while rejecting it, says, " The ex- 
ternal evidence for it is strong, the internal evidence rather in its 
favor, and it is coherent with what precedes." 
Peter, St. His descriptive powers contrasted with those of St. 
Matthew, 301-306. His reticence as to things personal, 304, and 
see note. His Gospel. The second Gospel cited as his by 
Justin, 314. Known as such by Tertullian, Irengeus, Jerome, 
and other Fathers, 313, 314. Originating motive of that Gospel, 
297-307. Other motives, 307. Its witness to the Incarnation, 

309-313. 

Petronius. — Story of, 119, 120. Josephus, Bell. Jud. xi, 10. 

Plato, Philo, and St. John, 251-253. 

Praying of our Lord, 243. 

Scriptures Explained. The seeming contradiction of Matt, viii, 7 
and Luke vii, 6 as to the presence of the centurion. Sewall's rec- 
onciliation of the two, 298 ; the difference between Matt, viii, 28, 
as to the place of the cure of the demoniacs, ' ' the country of the 
Gergesenes," and Mark v, 1, Luke viii, 26, "of the Gadarenes," 



INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 377 

note, 122 ; see also note, 320 ; John vii, 8, " I go not up to the 
feast," and 10, "then went He up unto the feast," 285, 286. 

Second Chapter of St. Matthew. Its historic and geographic 
terms, 152-154. I would here preserve the judgments of three 
scholars (as published in daily journals over their own names) 
concerning the Discussion of those terms in "The Wise Men" — 
that of Charles H. Brigham, Professor of Ecclesiastical History ; 
Tayler Lewis, Professor of Greek in Union College ; and Howard 
Crosby, author of a Greek Grammar, Chancellor of the University 
of New York. Professor Brigham said, " The Discussion of the 
meaning of the word avaroXuv, is exceedingly close and ingenious. 
If patient pleading and the collation of historic and archaeological 
facts can establish so nice a proposition, an excellent prima facie 
case has certainly been made out." Dr. Lewis said, " The disser- 
tation on the East and the Far East is important, clear, and I 
think accurate." Dr. Crosby said, "In a very masterly and con- 
vincing manner the author shows that the plural and singular 
avarakdv and avaroJir} conform to the Hebrew Mizrach and Ke- 
dem and are the Far-East and the East, and that these were to 
the Jews of Matthew's day geographical designations, represent- 
ing the Medo-Persian country, and Babylonia." 

Son of God, 309, note. The omission of those words (Mark i) 
from Davidson's " New Testament " led to that note, whose tone 
is not warranted by the facts, as the manuscripts almost universal- 
ly have those words, and as he follows the Sinaitic manuscript, 
which (it seems to be agreed) is carelessly written. 

Stephen, St. His argument, 166. This martyr the forerunner of 
Paul, 166. The persecution that began with his trial ; its charac- 
ter and motive, 164-172. 

Style of the Evangelists, 147-149. 

Times and Seasons. As to the day of the Last Supper there is 
much discussion ; yet, so far from leaving it uncertain, all the 
Evangelists fix the day by the term napaoicevT/, the Preparation 
Day. Matt, xxvii, 62, Mark xv, 42, Luke xxiii, 54, John xix, 14, 31. 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke also fix it as the day of unleavened 
bread (xxvi, 17, xiv, 12, xxii, 7); Mark and Luke also, as the day 
when, according to the law, the Paschal Lamb must be slain, that 
is, the 14th day of the month Nisan. Each and all so fix the day 
as to confirm what is said 150, 157, 158, of their carefulness as to 
Times and Seasons. When the sun of the 13th day had set, then 
the 14th day began, and then our Lord gave the order to make 
ready the Passover. It was kept by Him on the evening thus 



378 INDEX: WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES. 

belonging to the 14th day. It was kept by the Jews on the evening 
of the 15th day. The last fact is certain from each of the earlier 
Gospels, when read with the knowledge of the Jewish calendar, 
which their writers reasonably looked for, or give in their own 
words ; yet to modern readers that fact comes out unmistakably, 
only in the Gospel of St. John. It there so incidentally comes out. 
that evidently St. John is not aware of any variance between the 
earlier Gospels and his own ; and as he does not feel that there 
is a variance, there can be none. The debate has arisen out of 
the idea that the time-law of the festival was more rigorously ob- 
served than it can have been. With no record of the fact, it is as 
certain as if it were of record, that at one point the letter of the 
law was set aside. It was not possible to keep the law that the 
Paschal Lamb must be slain between the hours of three and five 
on the 14th day; and the killing in the Temple of the 260,000 
lambs needed for the great feast of all Israel in Jerusalem must 
have been going on for days before the 14th. There must have 
been other departures from the legal times, that were exceptional. 
If some family were called home before the eve of the 15th, (the 
slain lamb could be had,) and no doubt they ate their Passover be- 
fore they went. If some aged man who had dragged himself to 
the Holy City lay at the point of death and desired to eat his last 
Passover, there must have been the good sense and the good feel- 
ing to grant his pious wish by anticipating the time ; and the more 
readily, since the time-law, set aside by common consent as to one 
point, was loosened as to all others. The family of Jesus kept 
their Passover before the others. Nothing is said of a Paschal 
Lamb at their table ; but our Lord called that supper a Passover. 
He changed it into the Sacrament ; and the events of that day are 
parts of one whole. The Lord Jesus is the sacrifice — the Paschal 
Lamb foretold, (1 Cor. v, 7.) At the beginning of that 14th day 
our Lord revealed himself to his own family as the Lamb of God, 
whose flesh and blood is the life of the soul, and before that day 
was done, He revealed himself to all the world as the Lamb slain 
for the sin of the world. On that 14th day of the month Nisan, 
the day for the slaying of the Paschal Lamb, He transformed the 
Passover into the Sacrament ; on that same day he was slain, and 
the typical prophetic Jewish Passover ended forever. 

Unbelief. Disqualifies for sacred criticism, 77. Worthlessness of 
the skeptical writings concerning the Scriptures, 78. 

Verbal Coincidences in the Gospels, 42. 

Writing out of the Gospels, 44. 



WHO THEY WERE, AND HOW THEY CAME TO 
JERUSALEM. 

By FRANCIS W. UPHAM, LL.D. 
i2mo, pp. 258. Price, $1. 



In his admirable "Life of Jesus," Dr. Deems makes this 
frankly honorable and noteworthy statement : " This book is 
the first successful attempt that I have seen to clear up this 
pilgrimage. After reading it I canceled what I had before 
written on the subject." 

British Quarterly Review, No. CXIX, July, 1874. 

The subject is surrounded with grave difficulties, and de- 
mands candid, careful, and thorough examination. Without 
these the character of the Magi, the country from which they 
came, the inducements under which they acted, the reception 
they experienced at the hands of Herod, cannot be appreciated 
or understood. On all these questions Dr. Upham has be- 
stowed an examination at once thorough and scholarly, has re- 
moved all difficulty, and has invested the whole subject with 
singular interest. In no instance that we recollect has the visit 
of the magi been so luminously investigated, or so completely 
substantiated as a part of the divine history. The volume has 
our earnest commendation. 

The Presbyterian Review. 

We trust Dr. Upham will work on in the same rich vein of 
scriptural investigation, and thus lay the Christian public under 
yet greater obligations. 



Hartford Evening Post. 

If a pot of old coin is dug up in the ruins of some forsaken city, 
the telegraphic wires quiver round the world announcing the 
great discovery ; but here is a discovery of quite another kind — 
the solution of a historical and religious mystery ! We recall 
our childish impressions of this pilgrimage — our mature ideas 
were not much better. We recall our very picture of the magi ; 
of the bowed forms of three giant-like old men ; men of little 
account ; a sort of fakirs or fortune-tellers, wandering from a 
great but indefinite distance ; lonely, humble, tattered, and for- 
lorn ; in their long, dusty, graceless, and travel-stained gowns, 
turbaned and sandaled ; wandering, they knew not whither, to 
find the King of the Jews. Who were they? Whence came 
they ? How could they learn of the King of the Jews by a star? 
and what was the King of the Jews to them ? This strange 
bewildering tale, of a pilgrimage so improbable, so without any 
intelligible cause, of strangers from a far-off land who could 
know nothing of Christ — how could all this be? With such 
thoughts we took up the answer to the question, Who were the 
Wise Men ? 

It is seldom that learned people take the trouble to bring 
things within the comprehension of the people, but this is a 
book for the people, and they feel this magnetically. It does 
not lower the subject down, it lifts the reader up to it. Its sen- 
tences are like new coins just struck from the mint. The style 
flows like a swift river, deep and full, yet clear as crystal. Any 
one can see the thought, yet it is often so deep that the longer 
it is looked into the deeper it seems. A third or fourth reading 
brings out something new. What the writer seeks to prove 
comes out point by point till nothing is left to ask for. No 
shadow of doubt remains. In the light of this unique book we 
read the thrilling story of the Wise Men as we never read it 
before ; and in the still night we look with new wonder and 
awe into the blue depths above, and wish we knew which of all 
these glittering orbs was the one created " to herald through 
all worlds and date through all time " the advent of Him who 
was the Maker of all the worlds. 



gT$f{ 0$ OUf( I<Of(f): 

•OR, CHRIST JESUS, KING OF ALL WORLDS, BOTH OF TIME OR SPACE, 
WITH THOUGHTS ON INSPIRATION, AND THE ASTRO- 
NOMIC DOUBT AS TO CHRISTIANITY. 

By FRANCIS W. UPHAM, LL.D. 
i2mo, pp. 357. Price, $1 50. 



The author of this volume is a brother of Professor Thomas 
C. Upham, of Bowdoin College, so dear, for a quarter of a 
century, to the successive classes in that institution. He has 
many of the characteristics of his eminent brother: a shrinking 
modesty , a beautiful and fervent faith ; a scholarship as exact 
as it is full ; a marvelous patience in investigation ; a quaint, 
refined, and exquisite style; and a most noble spirituality of 
tone and thought. A few years ago Dr. Upham published a 
book about the Wise Men that surprised even those who were 
wonted to such researches. It was the porch to this inner sanct- 
uary. And the comparison of a sanctuary is fit and accurate 
in describing this volume. In all its argument, in all its de- 
scription, in its array of facts, in the current of musing, it is 
profoundly religious. It is a book all full of belief. The relig- 
iousness is real, in the soul of the book more than in its phrases, 
in the swell of the sea on which this bark of discovery rides. 
A book like this, in our critical, doubting time, when Ortho- 
doxy is so wavering, and so many hardly know what they be- 
lieve or where they stand — a book so sweet, fervent, rapf in its 
vision of heavenly things, which is so high and deep in its 
thought — is delight and refreshment. It is original enough in 
its proposition and its conclusion, even by its title-page, to 
be classed with books of sensation. But it belongs, in reality, 



to a very different class, to the class of which only elect souls 
see all the meaning and truth, and which teach continually, 
as their musical sentences linger in the memory. — The late 
Charles H. Brigham, (Unitarian,) Proj 'essor of Ecclesias- 
tical History. 

No Greek or Hindu legend could have been so historically, 
cleared, so explained, so exhibited in harmony with the highest 
human thought. In this there is no compromise, not the least 
ground for any suspicion of Dr. Upham's own orthodoxy. A 
great salvation from a great and fearful perdition, secured alone 
by the expiatory death of a great and divine Saviour, who is 
the Head of the Church, the Life of the Church, being at the 
same time the Lord of the Universe, and the indwelling 
Word or Life of Nature itself— this is the great idea that 
runs through these books. The writer presents it with un- 
flinching boldness. It is this fearless and at the same time 
most candid treatment of suppressed difficulties that entitles 
these works to our admiration. The term is used advisedly. 
There are such statements in the Bible, explicit narrations, the 
consideration of which may thus be said to be in a measure 
suppressed on account of their supposed difficulty. Such meet 
us in the beginning of Genesis and of Matthew. Unreliability 
in these places is unreliability every-where. Yet both of these 
parts of the Bible have been strangely neglected so far as any 
searching examination of them is concerned. 

The difficulty in the story of the Wise Men and of the Guid- 
ing Star has been encountered by Dr. Upham with a fidelity, a 
clearness, and a vigor we have seen manifested no where else. 
He aims to prove, and most readers will be convinced that he does 
prove, the authentic verity of the narration. Among the things 
made clear, settled, we think, beyond controversion, is the con- 
nection of the Star with the prophecy of Balaam. The effect 
of it upon the mind of the reader is as convincing as it is start- 
ling and impressive. The old wonder makes credible th( later 
prodigy. The eloquent exposition so lifts us into the supernat- 
ural sphere that it becomes natural, if we may use such a seem- 
ing paradox. In close connection with these prophetic wonders 
is the learned and satisfactory disquisition given in "The Wise 



Men," on the religion of the ancient Persians, and its connec- 
tion with primitive revelation. The Bible, a world book, even 
in its most ancient parts — such is the impression we get from 
the whole compass of this admirably managed argument — the 
Bible, a wonderous book, with awonderous harmony, revealing, 
even in its most unpretending parts, a wonderous power of 
which the careless reader has little or no conception. The 
best argument for the divinity of the Scripture comes from 
such expositions as these, showing it to be indeed a field of 
buried treasure. This is strongly felt in reading Dr. Upham's 
masterly exposition of the Eighth Psalm. The objection to the 
Scriptures drawn from what is called the astronomical argu- 
ment is the one from which we most shrink. All other natu- 
ralistic difficulties combined fall short of the appeal it makes 
to the imagination. We have nowhere seen this so well met as 
in the bold yet most fair and truthful argument devoted to it in 
this book. 

Along with it there is a dwelling upon the doctrine of the 
Logos in nature, as well as in grace ; a doctrine so unmistakably 
announced in the Scriptures old and new, yet so little heeded. 
We are thus led to the climax of the book : Christ the Lord of 
the worlds, his kingdom extending beyond the earth, having mys- 
teries which pertain to thrones, dominions, principalities, and 
powers, as well as to the human sphere. Thoughts like these 
certainly show themselves in the Scriptures, but the consideration 
of them is suppressed. We shrink from the difficulties they sug- 
gest. Dr. Upham meets them — meets them fairly, candidly — ■ 
meets them, we think, triumphantly. Sometimes we hesitate 
in following him. We fear it may be only the fascination of his 
style and of his enthusiasm that carries us away. But there 
they are, plainly visible in the Scripture, the views for which 
he contends ; and if we cannot resist the conviction that he is 
rightly employing its evidence, we are compelled to admit the 
power of his argument. — Tayler Lewis, author of the " Six 
Days of Creation." 

Dr. Upham's new work abounds in sublimities and beauties, 
that mark him a poet as well as a careful student of the pages 
of history and revelation. His view of the confusion of tongues. 



(i3,) his description of Balaam and Abraham, (21-26,) his story 
of Jacob's funeral, (29,) his defense of the Guiding Star, 
(115, 116,) and his notice of Sennacherib, (135-140,) may be 
mentioned as some of the passages that exhibit his mingled 
powers of poetry and research. He considers the star which 
guided the Magi to have been a real star, perhaps the centn.l 
star around which the material universe revolves, whose light 
first touched the earth at the time of our Saviour's birth, and 
whose guiding power from Jerusalem to Bethlehem was exer- 
cised through refraction, or some other natural law miracu- 
lously appointed for the purpose. The idea is certainly a most 
sublime one. that God should cause his grandest orb of glory 
to shine upon our sin-stricken earth, just as he caused his Son 
to appear upon it for man's salvation. We cannot here repeat 
or review Dr. Upham's arguments for his position, but can 
urge them as most interesting and weighty upon the attention 
of all. But whatever be the opinion of readers regarding the 
theory proposed, the book has excellences wholly apart from 
this. The part entitled " The Astronomic Doubt as to Chris- 
tianity," is itself a treatise of great value; and the exposition of 
the Eighth Psalm, occurring in it, is a specimen of the highest 
and truest style of exegesis. His thoughts on the death of the 
children at Bethlehem, and his argument thence to the salva- 
tion of all infants, are novel and conclusive. But we cannot 
emphasize one part of the book above another. It is full of 
profound and original thought. It is a rich and precious 
contribution to the literature of a true Christianity. — Howard 
Crosby, D.D., LL.D., Chancellor of the University of New 
York. 



